The Federal Reserve will begin cutting assets by $95 billion a month from its bloated $9 trillion balance sheet, in a bid to step up efforts to curb soaring U.S. inflation.

Officials finalized a plan to reduce the central bank’s presence in the U.S. government bond market, minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee’s last meeting in March showed.

The central bank’s footprint in the debt market has expanded significantly during the pandemic, as it has hoarded trillions of dollars in Treasuries and agency mortgage-backed securities in an attempt to avert an economic catastrophe.

But in the face of sustained highs inflationthe Fed is trying to tighten monetary policy, and shrinking its balance sheet is its main lever to cool the economy after raising interest rates.

According to minutes of the March meeting, officials broadly supported the Fed’s faster pace of asset reductions in the coming months through a process known as “runoff,” in which the central bank stops reinvesting maturing earnings in securities.

FOMC members generally agreed that the monthly cap for U.S. Treasuries at about $60 billion and agency MBS at $35 billion would be phased in over a three-month period, or “with a moderate extension if market conditions permit.” This equates to less than $1 trillion in assets lost annually.

Central bankers want to shrink their balance sheets quickly, and at a much faster pace than their previous attempt to divest assets in 2017 after the Fed’s bond holdings swelled from bond purchases after the start of the 2008 global financial crisis, the minutes showed.

At the time, the Fed capped monthly shrinking of its balance sheet at $50 billion and took a year to reach that pace.

Gov. Lael Brainard, who is awaiting Senate confirmation as the Fed’s next vice chair, said Tuesday that a rate cut would be “quickly” and could begin at the next policy meeting in May.

Given the extent to which inflation has exceeded the central bank’s 2% target and strength labor market.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell has previously signaled that the expected pace of balance sheet shrinking this year is roughly equivalent to raising interest rates by 25 basis points.

Minutes of the March meeting also showed that after deciding to raise the federal funds rate by 25 percentage points for the first time since 2018, officials were open to more aggressive rate hikes this year in response to rising prices.

That could include raising the federal funds rate by half a percentage point to bring it to a “neutral” level that neither accelerates nor slows economic growth this year. Officials estimate the rate to be between 2.3% and 2.5%.

In the weeks since the meeting, most officials said the policy rate should rise to 1.9% in 2022, and policymakers have assumed A more hawkish stance.

San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly, Tell The Financial Times said on Friday that there was a growing case for a 0.5 percentage point rate hike at its May meeting, echoing some of her colleagues who in recent weeks have expressed support for faster and stronger monetary tightening policy.