When JD Vance arrived in the Senate in 2023, he backed a raft of proposals that were characterized as reflecting a new brand of economic populism for the Republican Party. He championed higher taxes on some businesses, increased support for families and a willingness to interfere in free markets that bordered on the heretical in the modern GOP.

Two years later, the now-vice president’s distinctive policy ideas are hard to find in the tax legislation now advancing through Congress, some experts say.

The $3.3 trillion GOP tax bill, crafted by House and Senate Republicans and backed by the administration, largely extends President Donald Trump’s first-term tax cuts, with trillions of dollars in reduced rates for families across income brackets.

But proposals that Vance endorsed as a senator — such as a $5,000 child tax credit and a punitive tax on executives of large banks that fail — are excluded from the legislation. Meanwhile, the GOP tax bill includes steep cuts to Medicaid, the health insurance program, that appear at odds with the vice president’s prior statements.

No vice president gets to enact his or her agenda, and Vance campaigned with Trump on numerous policies that are part of the tax legislation. Vance’s defenders also point out that elements of the legislation have grown more populist since Trump’s 2017 tax law, in a potential sign that the party is moving in his direction.

But the absence of Vance’s policy ideas from the final legislation reflects a reality of today’s Republican Party: Even as he is widely seen as a potential successor to Trump, the vice president’s commitments are yet to be broadly adopted by the party, which remains largely wedded to traditional supply-side economics.

“It’s not the party JD Vance and [Sen.] Josh Hawley [R-Missouri] think it is,” said Kyle Pomerleau, a tax policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank. Hawley has backed many of the same populist ideas embraced by Vance in the Senate. “Vance has laid out a vision for a blue-collar Republican Party over the last couple years, but it hasn’t materialized in this bill.”

Michael Strain, an economist who is also at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, pointed to Vance’s prior opposition to cutting Medicaid and populist posture toward some large firms.

“The inverse of Vance’s policies are what is reflected in the House and Senate bills,” Strain said.

The legislation has some nods to a more populist GOP agenda. It includes hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to fulfill Trump’s pledges to end taxes on tips and a large tax deduction for seniors, partially delivering on the president’s campaign promise to end taxes on Social Security benefits. The House version of the bill also pared back some of the pro-growth tax revisions, although the Senate appears on track to make those policies permanent.

It is also typical for vice presidents to have only limited influence over White House policy. As a senator and later a presidential candidate, for instance, Kamala Harris proposed numerous policies — including monthly stimulus checks — that Democrats did not consider enacting when she was vice president. Vance played a role in the tax negotiations, helping to mediate disputes among congressional Republicans.

“Vice President Vance campaigned relentlessly on behalf of President Trump’s policy agenda, which includes no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, securing the southern border, deporting illegal aliens, and unleashing American energy to bring down the cost of living,” Vance spokesman Will Martin said in a statement. “All of these policies are included in the One Big Beautiful Bill. This legislation will amount to the largest working-class tax cut in history, and the American people will be immensely better-off when President Trump signs it into law.”

On social media Monday evening, Vance also praised the immigration enforcement provisions, writing that “everything else” — including the “minutiae” of Medicaid policy and the score from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office — was “immaterial” by comparison.

Still, many experts pointed to the gap between what Vance proposed as a senator and the GOP’s current major legislative initiative.

Vance on the campaign trail floated a $5,000-per-child refundable tax credit, in a major expansion of the existing child tax credit, to encourage families to have more children. Democrats had increased the credit from $2,000 to $3,000 under President Joe Biden, a policy that later expired amid uniform GOP opposition. Vance suggested Biden’s policies hadn’t gone far enough.

The Senate GOP tax bill only modestly expands the credit, increasing it from $2,000 per child to $2,200. Vance previously also said the child benefit should be expanded to cover “all families,” suggesting he would support repealing the current exclusion of the poorest families. The GOP bill does not extend the credit to lower-income families.

Vance also backed a wide range of legislation to go after bad actors in the business sector. He partnered with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) to penalize executives of failed banks, with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) to tax larger mergers to discourage consolidation, and with Sen Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) to cut credit card fees. Some of these proposals may not have made it into the bill even if the party had been supportive, because they would have run afoul of the Senate rules Republicans are using to pass the tax package. However, none was seriously considered, and the GOP did not take up other policies targeting Wall Street or large credit card firms.

In a 2017 op-ed for The New York Times, Vance also criticized the Trump health care bill for moving large numbers of Americans off of Medicaid to the private market without ensuring they can “meaningfully purchase care.”

“In the rosiest projections of each version, millions will be unable to pay for basic health care,” Vance wrote at the time. “This wasn’t acceptable to Reagan in 1961, and it shouldn’t be acceptable to his political heirs.” The current Senate bill is projected to reduce the number of Americans with insurance by roughly 12 million, fewer than the 2017 repeal bill, although the administration has criticized these projections.

Some of Vance’s allies have been outspoken about their discomfort with the Trump tax bill. At a gala in June, Vance and Oren Cass, chief economist and founder of the conservative think tank American Compass, spoke onstage about the “ongoing political realignment” of the GOP. But Cass has been stridently outspoken in his criticisms of the administration’s signature economic policy. Cass told Politico that the bill is a “death march” and said Trump had a “somewhat ambivalent attitude toward a lot of the more populist thinking.” Cass also said, “The version passed by the House does not have the elements to be successful.”

Allies point out that Vance is not in charge of the Senate Finance Committee, and that his role as vice president limits his direct influence over the bill’s content. As George Callas, a former GOP tax aide who now leads the public finance team at Arnold Ventures, put it, “Vice presidents don’t often have much of a say — at the end of the day, they’re carrying the president’s water.” But Callas also pointed to the deeper dynamic at work: a Republican Party caught in the middle of a transformation that may never materialize, with some populist voices that have for now not gained meaningful control over the party’s levers of power.

“In the middle of the evolution, the populists are strong enough to get some of their candy included — like no tax on tips — but not the spinach,” Callas said. “The old guard is still strong enough to get business and supply-side tax cuts.”