With a singular focus the Federal Reserve has struggled to pull inflation down to its 2% target. By its own forecasts, US central bankers won’t complete the mission until 2026. The dedication to a yearslong journey has cemented the idea that rates will stay higher for longer or that even more drastic rate hikes — and possibly a recession — will be required to achieve an elusive 2%.

While reaching that goal has long been entrenched in the Fed’s mission and public commitments, the costs of doing so have invited some calls to aim for a more realistic goal, fit for the current moment: raising the inflation target.

The main argument for upping the desired rate boils down to the difficulty in trying to get down to 2%. Fed officials would have to knock the economy so forcefully, the thinking goes, they would likely spark a recession to get there — as stubborn winds blow in the face of its inflation fight.

But central bankers have resisted such calls, with one Fed official even saying the implications could be disastrous.

Formalized more than a decade ago, the 2% target has become entwined with the Fed’s mandate to ensure price stability. It’s a Goldilocks number that’s palatable enough for consumers and businesses but not low enough to trigger deflation.

But the number itself is more a convention than economic canon.

“The Fed wants to be sure that there isn't too much inflation, which makes it tough for consumers to live their lives and pay their bills, but the Fed also doesn't want deflation, where prices are declining, because deflation can slow the economy,” said Jason Betz, a private wealth adviser at Ameriprise Financial. “The 2% target is the sweet spot level for the Fed.”

Stash Graham, managing director at Graham Capital Wealth Management, said the primary criticism of the inflation goal is that 2% is a long-term target that might not be realistic for the near-term time horizon. While rate hikes have cooled demand in many areas of the economy, supply-related shocks that are beyond the control of the central bank are reverberating. From the escalating violence in Gaza, which could trigger a broader conflict, to ongoing labor strikes, there’s a host of issues that could prevent the Fed from reaching its target.

Market observers who have argued for the Fed to tweak its target contend that a goal higher than the current 2% would give the central bank more flexibility. With added breathing room the Fed wouldn't have to keep raising rates or keep them as high for longer. And the economic pain that comes with rate hikes — from job losses to more expensive household borrowing to sluggish growth — wouldn’t be as acute.

Jason Furman, an economics professor at Harvard who served as a top economist in the Obama administration, argued in a recent op-ed that the Fed should move to a higher target range when it updates its overall strategy around 2025.

But Fed officials have long pushed back on moving the goalpost. When the question was posed directly to Chair Powell last year, he offered a resounding dismissal.

"We're not considering that. We're not going to consider that. Under any circumstances," he said in December.

Testifying in front of the Senate Banking Committee in March, he elaborated on staying firm. "We think it's really important that we do stick to a 2% inflation target and not consider changing it," Powell told lawmakers. “The modern belief is that people's expectations about inflation actually have a real effect on inflation. If you expect inflation to go up 5% then it will," he said.

Powell’s remarks highlight a credibility problem of altering the inflation target. A change risks unsettling expectations about future price increases, which influences the actual rate of inflation.

“They already cost themselves credibility by trying to convince us that inflation was transitory,” said Russell Hackmann, president of Hackmann Wealth Partners LLC. Changing the inflation target all of a sudden, he said, would be akin to “the kid who grades his own homework.”

But a big-picture review of the Fed’s inflation goal is still a possibility, as even Powell has acknowledged. “There may be a longer-run project at some point,” he has said.

Other critics of the powerful role of central banks have pushed for a bigger overhaul, questioning the heavy reliance on what they see as an imprecise lever of roundabout rate setting.

Joshua Ryan-Collins, an economics professor at UCL’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, said the paradigm of prior decades worked in an environment of low inflation and stable growth. But the disruptions unleashed by COVID and by the Russian invasion of Ukraine have shown that model is not sustainable. “If central banks really want to deal with modern-day inflation they have to rethink their approach on the drivers of inflation and worry less about the short-term demand side,” he said. "The bigger issue is supply-side inflationary shocks, which are going to keep coming and going to get worse.”

Hamza Shaban is a reporter for Yahoo Finance covering markets and the economy. Follow Hamza on Twitter @hshaban.

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