During last month’s press conference, Jerome Powell went out of his way to suggest upward revisions to the Fed’s inflation projections in the new SEP weren’t solely, or even mostly, attributable to the election outcome and the macro read-through of Donald Trump’s policy proposals.

Some were skeptical. After all, the Committee didn’t get much in the way of new information on the macro front between November’s FOMC meeting and the December policy gathering — just more of the same, which in this case means additional evidence of sticky underlying inflation and data which broadly suggests the US labor market’s holding up well enough.

Of course, the SEP wasn’t refreshed at the November meeting, so Powell could plausibly argue the updated core inflation projections were in fact a function of data received between the end of Q3 and the end of Q4. All the same, it’s difficult to escape the suspicion that at least some officials factored tariffs and even the prospective impact of mass deportations into their inflation outlook last month.

Minutes from the December FOMC meeting released on Wednesday confirmed as much. “Participants expected that inflation would continue to move toward 2%, although they noted that recent higher-than-expected readings on inflation, and the effects of potential changes in trade and immigration policy, suggested the process could take longer than previously anticipated,” the account of the proceedings read.

There you go. Fed officials did indeed discuss the potential for Trump’s policies to delay inflation’s return to 2%. To be fair, Powell didn’t say tariffs and immigration weren’t discussed, and he didn’t deny that some policymakers might’ve engaged in preliminary extrapolation for the purposes of their new inflation outlook. But he did suggest (rather explicitly) that any such extrapolation wasn’t the primary driver of the upward shift in the median participant’s core inflation outlook.

The minutes shed a little more light on the extent to which Trump’s policies were in fact considered germane by “a number” of Fed officials who “incorporated placeholder assumptions” about “foreign trade and immigration” into their projections “to one degree or another.”

Further, “several” officials cautioned that the disinflation process “may have stalled temporarily,” and “a couple” suggested animal spirits in financial markets and across the economy “could continue to put upward pressure on inflation.”

You could, I suppose, contend the minutes were just a longer version of what Powell told reporters last month. I read them a little differently: I think they suggest heightened concern among at least some on the Committee around the possibility that Trump’s policies could rekindle price pressures through a number of channels, thereby leading to a “defeat from the jaws of victory” scenario for a Fed already struggling to run the proverbial “last mile” of the “bumpy” road back to on-target inflation.

That said, Chris Waller on Wednesday indicated he doesn’t expect any lasting impact on inflation from tariffs. Which is the sort of thing you’d say if you wanted to stay on the good side of the man who nominated you.