Congressional Bills (BILLS)

Congressional Bills contains the complete official text of U.S. House and Senate bills and resolutions at each stage of publication by the Government Publishing Office, from initial introduction through enactment.

Congressional Bills is the authoritative collection of legislation text. When a bill is introduced in the House or Senate, the Government Publishing Office publishes it in a standardized format. As the bill advances through the legislative process—amended in committee, passed by one chamber, amended by the other chamber, or sent to the President—new versions are published. Each published version is included in this collection.

Congress publishes bills at specific stages. An introduced bill shows the original text. When a committee reports out a bill with amendments, a new version (engrossed) is published. When a chamber passes a bill, that version is published. If the other chamber amends it, another version appears. When both chambers pass identical text and the bill moves to the President, a final enrolled version is published. This collection contains text from all these stages, allowing readers to trace how language changed as a bill progressed.

The collection sits at the center of the legislative record. It works alongside the Congressional Record (which documents floor debate) and committee reports (which explain legislative intent). Together, these sources provide a complete picture of what Congress did and why. Congressional Bills provides the actual statutory language, updated at each major procedural checkpoint.

The data is published as structured text by the Government Publishing Office. Each bill is typically 20-40 kilobytes of XML text, depending on the bill's length. The collection is complete—every bill introduced receives a bill number, is published in text form, and appears in this source.

In this digest, readers encounter Congressional Bills when new legislation is introduced or when bills reach a significant procedural milestone (passage by a chamber, committee markup, or presidential action). The digest extracts from bills to show what they propose, what provisions they contain, or what they would change in existing law. Readers see the official legislative language, as published by the Government Publishing Office, grounding reports about legislative activity in the statutory text itself.

Note: bills that fail to be introduced formally, or that exist only as draft proposals before introduction, do not appear here. This collection contains only formally introduced measures given bill numbers by Congress.

Model-written orientation, generated 2026-08-04 by haiku, prompt version 1. It may draw on general knowledge of public institutions and is not official-record content.

Bill text arrives as structured XML through govinfo delta sync, capturing all printed editions across publication stages. Over 14 days we collected 243 items averaging 20,938 characters (range 505 to 2.8 million) at roughly 17 per day, most recent on September 4. The shared api.govinfo.gov host exhibits 25.6% request failure across all collections. Compared to the previous measurement (307 items at ~22/day), both collection volume and daily rate have declined. The substantial average item size reflects the mix of complete bill texts across different publication stages.

Model-written assessment of our own ingestion, generated 2026-09-05 by haiku, prompt version 1, trigger: age-30d. It restates our measured figures and is not official-record content.