"The committee does not expect it will be appropriate to reduce the target range until it has gained greater confidence that inflation is moving sustainably toward 2%," the FOMC said in a statement issued at the end of its two-day meeting on Friday.

What may be more important is what was not in the statement.

"They removed any language about the potential for future rate hikes," Melissa Cohn, regional vice president, William Raveis Mortgage, noted in an email.

Rate-indicative bond yields immediately rose after the FOMC statement, but Cohn cautioned that the move could be short-lived and depend on how the market reacted to the Fed Chairman Jerome Powell's ensuing press conference.

"Bond yields are on the rise, and mortgage rates will highly depend on economic data," she said. "Mr. Powell's press conference will be a key factor in determining rates for the rest of the day."

The Fed's inaction was largely anticipated but out-of-step with what some members of Congress such as Sen. Sherrod Brown, D.-Ohio, and lenders would like to see. The committee makes regular reports to Congress but has autonomy in its monetary policy decisions.

"Higher rates are locking Americans out of two primary means of building wealth — buying a home and starting or growing a small business," Brown said in a Jan. 30 letter to Fed Chairman Jerome Powell that CNN was the first to share.

Weakness in housing is unlikely to be a priority for the Fed because valuations remain strong, according to Fannie Mae Chief Economist Doug Duncan.

"Housing certainly is slow, but prices are still up because of supply issues. So I think they're not going to worry about that," Duncan said in an earlier interview.

But the FOMC may be considering a policy change around the Fed's Treasury bond holdings, which aren't as directly tied to long-term mortgage rates but do factor into the outlook for housing finance, Duncan said.

"They have to be looking at the volume of Treasuries that's going to come into the market this year," he said.

Policymakers may be particularly interested in this because the relationship between short- and long-term Treasuries has been inverted compared to the usual yield curve they form.

More typically long-term rates are higher than short-term rates, but the reverse has been true raising concerns because it can be indicative of a pending recession and upends some typical rate relationships mortgage lenders and other businesses rely on in their funding models.

The curve has gotten closer to its normal shape since policymakers indicated an intent to move into easing mode at some point this year (and for other reasons, Fannie recently backed off its call for a recession) — but it's still somewhat inverted.

"Looking at the volume of Treasuries that's going to come into the market, what does that mean for the shape of the curve? They have to be talking about that," Duncan said.