> The Articles of Confederation were designed to give limited power to a weak federal government and more power to stronger state governments. It was a disaster, then we tried again - the other way - with the Constitution.

The country thrived under the Constitution with a narrow interpretation of the commerce clause and a federal government that spent 3% of GDP instead of 20% for more than a hundred years.

The expansive "reinterpretation" of federal power in the 20th century was the source of all the existing trouble.

And average education, health, and quality of life outcomes are significantly higher now.

I would posit that those outcomes had more to do with scientific progress than with whether social security or the ban on leaded gasoline are implemented at the federal level versus the states.

And a significant amount of that progress was funded by the government, relied on discoveries funded by government, or were made by people who lived or were educated because of government funding.

Which part of research funding requires it to be done at the federal level rather than the states?

If anything we're under-funding it now for precisely that reason. The federal government extracts money from every state's tax base and then spends it on the F-35. Whereas the states have to compete with each other for talent, so California given their proportion of the same money would want to give it to UCLA or Berkeley to attract the sort of high-earning taxpayers who want to send their kids to those schools or graduate from them and stay in the state, or cause local research grant recipients to put down roots and found successful companies. And so would all the others.

Limited government was certainly Jeffersons aim:

"The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

Washington seems to agree, for example this quote from his farewell address:

"It is important that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart, is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position."

We should have gone to Jefferson and Washington's farms and taken a vote on what kinds of changes were necessary.

If you think about that a bit more deeply, if Washington and Jefferson had been fans of a strong federal government slavery would've been a federal policy as opposed to a per state policy and likely would've been much more difficult to end as the northern states would've contained slave owners as opposed to only the southern states.