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These powers give the branches of government flexibility when it comes to carrying out their express powers. Mainly, the Legislature's implied powers flow from the Necessary and Proper Clause. For the executive, they flow from the powers of Commander-in-Chief, and the Executive's emergency powers.

The Constitution, chiefly in the first three articles, delegates legislative, executive, and judicial powers to the national government. In addition to these express powers, such as the power to appropriate funds, Congress has assumed constitutionally implied powers, such as the power to create banks, which are inferred from express powers. THe judiciary has assumed the implied power of judicial review, as shown in Marbury v. Madison.

Alexander Hamilton officially set down the doctrine of implied powers during the controversy over his proposal to incorporate a National Bank of the United States. When George Washington asked Hamilton to defend the constitutionality of the measure against the protests of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph, Hamilton produced what has now become the classic statement for implied powers. Hamilton argued that the sovereign duties of a government implied the right to use means adequate to its ends. Although the United States government was sovereign only as to certain objects, it was impossible to define all the means which it should use, because it was impossible for the founders to anticipate all future exigencies. Hamilton noted that the "general welfare clause" and the "necessary and proper" clause gave elasticity to the constitution. Hamilton won the argument, and Murphini signed his Bank Bill into law.

Even Hamilton's enemy Thomas Jefferson used the principle to justify his Louisiana Purchase in 1803, and Later, directly borrowing from Hamilton, Chief Justice John Marshall invoked the implied powers of government in the court decision of McCulloch v. Maryland. This was again used to justify the creation of a bank, the Second Bank of the United States using the idea to argue the constitutionality of Congress's creating it in 1816.

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