Let’s start with this: the “Founding Fathers” didn’t do anything as a singular group. It’s important to remember that the men we call the Founding Fathers were an argumentative, fractious group of people who didn’t agree on what exactly it was that they were doing. There was no one person or vision that can be applied to “what the Founders intended”, because the Founders didn’t all agree on what they were doing even as they were doing it. Almost as soon as the ink was dry on the Constitution (and later the Bill of Rights), the same people who helped draft and ratify these documents began arguing about what they meant and how to apply them in practice. Arguing over what the text of the Constitution means is an American tradition as old as the Constitution itself (and arguably slightly older).

With that out of the way, the Constitution, as originally written and ratified, stated the powers of the federal government while providing some restraints as well. For example, Article 1, Section 8 describes a number of specific powers that Congress shall have, including the power to impose and collect taxes, to coin money, and to declare war (among others). This section also grants Congress the broad power to "make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.” That last clause allows for some fairly broad Congressional interpretations about what will be "necessary and proper" when it comes to carrying out these powers. Similarly, the Constitution provides the powers of the Executive (President) and the Judiciary (Supreme Court and Federal Courts), but, again, these powers are relatively broad and can be open to some interpretation.

A few years later, the first ten amendments to the Constitution (known collectively as “The Bill of Rights”) were ratified. These amendments mostly placed further restrictions on the federal government, specifying certain things that the government could not do (such as establish an official religion) or things that the government “shall” do (such as ensure the right to a speedy trial). Subsequent amendments to the Constitution either added additional power (such as the 16th amendment granting the federal government the explicit power to levy an income tax) or additional restraints (such as various amendments prohibiting certain limits on the right to vote).

Maybe the most important thing to understand, however, is that the Constitution was drafted specifically because the original founding document, the Articles of Confederation, left the United States without a sufficiently strong central government. The loose confederation of states envisioned under the Articles was unable to respond to the needs of the day. Under the Articles, the government struggled to enforce its laws and could not pay debts left over from the Revolutionary War, so the states called together a Constitutional Convention to re-imagine what kind of country the United States would be. The members of the Constitutional Convention drafted and approved the U.S. Constitution that we have today, which was later ratified by the states. The drafters of the Constitution certainly expected later generations to amend the Constitution, because they wrote the ability to do so right into the original document. [1] Whether they anticipated the specific sorts of arguments that later generations had, I can't say - but they most certainly expected there to be arguments of some sort, as they were already having arguments of their own.

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[1] National Archives, "Constitutional Amendment Process": https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/constitution