The move will reverberate in Washington, where the Trump administration is asking Republicans in Congress to enact a tax plan with the same basic structure as the one Brownback put in place in Kansas: sharp reductions in income tax rates as well as a large drop in the rate paid by small business owners that file their taxes individually, known as “pass-through” entities. “It’s a great day in Kansas and a blow to the myth of trickle-down taxation,” said Jared Bernstein, a liberal economist who served as a top adviser in the Obama White House. “Whether D.C. Republicans will learn from the Kansas legislature is very much another question.”

Indeed, conservatives took a very different lesson from the Brownback experience. The goal of conservative economic philosophy is to reduce the size of government—to shrink it down so small that you could “drown it in a bathtub,” in Grover Norquist’s famous description. Kansas only followed one half of the plan. “Don’t cut taxes and increase spending,” said Dave Trabert, president of the right-leaning Kansas Policy Institute. “That’s what Kansas did. That’s a bad plan, and it’s the root of all of Kansas’s problems.”

Yet where advocates on both the right and the left agreed is that Kansas, despite its decades-long tradition of Republican governance, simply did not want to go as far to the right economically as Brownback tried to push the state. While job growth did increase following enactment of the tax cuts, bipartisan coalitions rebelled against cuts to the schools. “Education actually matters to people in Kansas,” Bernstein said. “The lesson is that when it comes to things government provides, people value that more than conservative ideology admits.”

Trabert reached a similar conclusion. “There simply was not the political will to reduce the cost of government,” he told me. After moderate Republicans ousted conservatives in 2016 primary campaigns, legislators came to believe they would face punishment from voters if they cut spending too deeply. “It’s not about citizens. It’s not about students,” Trabert said. “It’s about getting elected and reelected.”

While Congress often looks to states for ideas—and warnings—about policy, there’s a limit to how much influence the Kansas example will have with Republicans on Capitol Hill. The biggest difference between the federal and state governments is that Washington can borrow money and run deficits, while states must balance their budgets. And the GOP has repeatedly prioritized the potential for economic growth it sees in tax cuts over the potential ramifications for the deficit. While Trump officials have wavered on whether a tax bill must be paid for, the administration’s one-page outline would add trillions to the debt without corresponding revenue increases that it didn’t propose.