Few and Defined, the Promise About Federal Power in Madison's Federalist 45

Here is a hypothetical, clearly labelled as one. Suppose we could bring James Madison forward to the present, sit him down with a cup of coffee, and hand him three documents: the federal budget, the Code of Federal Regulations and the Federal Register. Then suppose we asked him to find the part of the federal government he described in 1788. He would find it, eventually. It is the part that handles war, peace, diplomacy and foreign trade. He might need a magnifying glass.

The promise he made was in Federalist 45, and it is the clearest statement in the entire ratification debate of what the federal government was supposed to be. It is short, it is specific, and it was made to win votes from people who feared exactly what later happened. That makes it more than an interesting old essay. It is the terms of the deal. When a salesman says the car has a warranty to get you to sign, the warranty is part of the sale.

The promise, in Madison's words

Federalist 45 was published in January 1788. Its subject is the danger that the new federal government would swallow the states. The Anti-Federalists said it would. Madison said the danger ran the other way: the states were more likely to encroach on the federal government than the reverse. And then he wrote the paragraph that every federalist should be able to recite:

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.

Read it slowly, because each clause makes a specific commitment.

1. Federal powers are "few." There is a short list. You can count them.
2. Federal powers are "defined." Each one has edges. You can tell where it stops.
3. State powers are "numerous and indefinite." The states hold everything not delegated. Their list cannot be written down because it covers the whole ordinary business of life.
4. Federal powers face outward. They are exercised "principally on external objects": war, peace, negotiation, foreign commerce.
5. State powers face inward. They cover "all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people."

Then Madison adds a prediction about timing:

The operations of the federal government will be most extensive and important in times of war and danger; those of the State governments, in times of peace and security.

In other words, the federal government should be large when the country is at war and small when it is not. It should expand in a crisis and shrink back afterward.

Madison's case that the states would be stronger

Most of Federalist 45 is an argument for why the states, not the federal government, would have the advantage. His reasons are worth stating, because they explain why he was confident enough to make the promise.

The states are part of the federal machinery. The state legislatures chose senators. They directed how presidential electors would be appointed. The federal government could not operate without them, while the states could operate without the federal government.

The states employ more people. Madison argued that the number of people working under the federal Constitution would be much smaller than the number working for the states, the counties and the towns. State officers reach into every community; federal officers would be few. That gives the states the personal influence that comes from being present in people's lives.

The new powers are mostly old powers. Madison argued that the Constitution did not so much add new powers as make effective the powers the Articles of Confederation had already given Congress: war, peace, treaties, armies, borrowing and requisitions of money. The main new power he admitted was commerce:

The regulation of commerce, it is true, is a new power; but that seems to be an addition which few oppose, and from which no apprehensions are entertained.

Hold that sentence in mind. It is the most painfully ironic line in the whole series, and we will come back to it.

The public good is the measure. Madison also rebuked those who cared more about the power of the state governments as institutions than about the people. He asked, in substance, whether the Revolution had been fought so that the people could enjoy peace, liberty and safety, or so that the state governments could enjoy a certain extent of power. And he answered:

the public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form of government whatever has any other value than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object.

That passage is often quoted by those who want a bigger federal government, as if Madison were saying the Union should do whatever serves the public good. Read in context, it means the opposite of a blank check. Madison was saying that neither level of government has value in itself. Both are tools. And his whole argument was that the tool fitted to the people's welfare was a federal government confined to a few external objects and states handling everything else.

Measuring the promise against the modern budget

Now let us hold the promise up to the federal government as it is. We will use only figures we can state with certainty, and describe the rest by mechanism.

Defense and diplomacy. These are Madison's "external objects." They are still in the federal budget, of course. But anyone who reads the Congressional Budget Office's tables will find that national defense is a minority of federal spending, smaller than the major health and retirement programs. The outward-facing government Madison described is now the smaller part of what Washington spends.

Retirement and health programs. Social Security was enacted in 1935. Medicare and Medicaid were enacted in 1965. Whatever their merits, they are not war, peace, negotiation or foreign commerce. They concern "the lives, liberties, and properties of the people" in "the ordinary course of affairs," which is precisely the category Madison assigned to the states.

Grants-in-aid. A large share of what states spend on roads, schools, health care and welfare arrives from Washington, with conditions attached. This is the mechanism by which the federal government reaches the "numerous and indefinite" objects without directly regulating them: it pays the states to do things its way. In South Dakota v. Dole (1987), the Supreme Court upheld a law withholding a portion of federal highway money from states that kept a drinking age under twenty-one. Congress may not have been able to set a national drinking age directly. It could buy one.

Debt. Madison's federal government would borrow mainly in war. According to Treasury's Debt to the Penny, the total public debt was $38.05 trillion on November 4, 2025 and $40.56 trillion on November 5, 2026. The arithmetic: $40.56 trillion minus $38.05 trillion is $2.51 trillion added in about one year, which works out to roughly $6.9 billion a day ($2.51 trillion divided by 365). That was not a year of declared war. Madison predicted the federal government would be most extensive "in times of war and danger." The modern one is most extensive all the time. Watch the figure on the national debt clock, and see Seven myths about the national debt that Washington finds convenient.

Measuring the promise against regulation

The regulatory reach tells the same story. The Federal Register published 3,248 final rules in 2024 and 2,441 in 2025. Add them: 5,689 final rules in two years. Each one is a binding command from a federal agency. They govern how a farmer drains a field, how a small manufacturer labels a product, how a bank lends, how a school disciplines a student. Very few concern "war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce."

Most of that reach rests on one clause: the power "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes." Remember Madison's reassurance that commerce was a new power "from which no apprehensions are entertained." Here is what became of it.

• In Wickard v. Filburn (1942), the Supreme Court held that Congress could penalize an Ohio farmer for growing wheat beyond his federal quota, even wheat he grew to feed his own animals, because in the aggregate such wheat affected interstate commerce.
• In United States v. Lopez (1995), the Court finally drew a line, striking down a federal law against carrying a gun near a school because possessing a gun in a school zone is not economic activity.
• In Gonzales v. Raich (2005), the Court went back toward Wickard, holding that Congress could reach marijuana grown at home for personal use under state law.

So the power that was supposed to cause no apprehensions became the main engine of federal regulation of purely local activity. What the clause meant to the men who wrote it is in What Commerce Among the Several States Meant to the Men Who Wrote It, and the role of the Necessary and Proper Clause in stretching it is in The Necessary and Proper Clause Was Never Meant to Be a Blank Check. The regulatory mechanics are covered in Agencies Write Thousands of Rules a Year While Congress Passes Hundreds of Laws.

The objection: the country changed, and the people chose it

The strongest objection, in words its defenders would accept, runs like this. Federalist 45 described a country of about four million people, mostly farmers, with no national economy, no industrial corporations, no national transportation network and no national markets. The world changed. The economy became national and then global. The people, through their elected representatives, chose to build a larger federal government to meet the new conditions. They even amended the Constitution: the Sixteenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, authorized a federal income tax. Holding a modern country to a ratification-season prediction is like holding a city to a zoning map from 1788.

The answer, point by point.

1. Madison's promise was a description of the Constitution, not a forecast about the economy. He did not say the federal government would be small because the country was small. He said it would be limited because its powers were "few and defined." The enumeration did not change when the railroads arrived. Article I still lists the same powers it listed in 1788.

1. The Constitution has a procedure for change, and it was used only partly. The objection rightly notes the Sixteenth Amendment. That is exactly the point. When the country wanted a new federal power, it amended the Constitution to get one. Article V was there for the rest too. The problem is not that the federal government grew; it is that most of the growth came through reinterpretation rather than amendment. The power to tax incomes was granted. The power to regulate a farmer's feed wheat was not.

1. A national economy does not need a national government for everything. Many of the problems of a modern economy, such as trade barriers between states, can be handled by the commerce power as originally understood: a power to keep commerce among the states regular and free. Everything else, from schools to professional licensing to most criminal law, can be handled by states, which compete with each other for residents and businesses. That competition is a feature. See Federalism Lets Fifty States Experiment, and the Constitution Planned It.

1. The people did not choose most of this. Many of the largest expansions came from court decisions like Wickard and from agency rules written under broad delegations. Those were not choices made by the people in the way the Constitution requires for structural change. They were choices made for them.

1. The deal was the reason for ratification. States ratified because they were told the federal government's powers were few and defined. Several ratifying conventions asked for an amendment reserving to the states the powers not delegated, and the Tenth Amendment wrote the principle into the text. Changing the terms after the signature, without the consent of the other party, is not adaptation. It is a breach.

The verdict: the country changed, but the Constitution did not change nearly as much as the government did. The gap between the two is the measure of how far Federalist 45's promise has been broken.

Keeping the promise

What would keeping Madison's promise look like, practically? Not abolishing the modern government overnight, which is neither possible nor prudent. It looks like a direction, applied consistently.

• Courts that enforce the enumeration. Lopez and the federalism cases show it can be done. Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024), overruling Chevron, means courts now decide for themselves what a statute means instead of deferring to the agency's reading, which narrows the regulatory reach at its source.
• Congress that asks the question. Every bill should identify the enumerated power it relies on. House rules already require a constitutional authority statement with every bill introduced there; the question is whether anyone reads those statements seriously.
• States that use their sovereignty. States can decline federal grants whose conditions they reject, and they can design their own programs. A state that takes every dollar Washington offers has handed Washington its "numerous and indefinite" powers one grant at a time.
• Subsidiarity as a habit. Decisions belong at the lowest level competent to make them: the family, the town, the county, the state, and only then Washington. That principle has deep roots in Catholic social teaching; see Subsidiarity, the 1931 Catholic principle every federalist should know.

Federalist 45 is, in the end, a promise made by the side that won. It is also a promise that the citizens of the states are still entitled to collect on. You can read the text and the enumerated powers on the Constitution page.

The case in brief

1. Madison promised that federal powers would be few and defined, exercised mainly on war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce, while state powers would be numerous and indefinite.
2. He argued the states would be stronger because they were part of the federal machinery, employed more people and governed the ordinary business of life.
3. Measured against the modern budget, regulation and the commerce power, the promise has been broken mostly by reinterpretation, not by amendment.
4. The strongest objection, that the country changed, fails because the Constitution provides for change by amendment and the people were rarely asked.
5. The promise can still be kept by courts that enforce the enumeration, a Congress that cites its powers, and states that use their own.

What you can do: pick one bill your representative has co-sponsored, find its constitutional authority statement on Congress.gov, and ask the office in writing whether the power it cites is one of the few and defined ones.