
Ask HN: How are Senate/House bills prepared? - telekid
Specifically, how do tens to hundreds of senators or representatives collaborate on documents that often grow in excess of 1000 pages? How are changes tracked?<p>I noticed that today&#x27;s Senate healthcare reform bill appears to be laid out in TeX (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.budget.senate.gov&#x2F;imo&#x2F;media&#x2F;doc&#x2F;BetterCareJuly13.2017.pdf). Does anyone on HN have insight into the production process that resulted in that final document?
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goldenbeet
I know literally next to nothing about this, so beware my comment. However,
I'm pretty sure that " tens to hundreds of senators or representatives
collaborate" is not a thing for bills.

It's typically a small group of people who create the bill. (Like a Senator
and their staff) It gets proposed to a subcommittee who reads it (I believe
they also give feedback) and then accept/reject it. If accepted it then gets
passed to the entire Senate/House for people to read and accept/reject.

If you're curious about how the actual writing occurs, I'm sure its nothing
special. Just like writing a group paper in school.

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ksherlock
That was created with Adobe Acrobat Distiller -- That font isn't CMR, it's New
Century Schoolbook (The Supreme Court likes that font as well). There's also a
"gpospec5" font (perhaps GPO is the Government Printing/Publishing Office). I
could only find a handful of references the the gpospec5 font, including this
one [1] on the previous healthcare bill. Windows user ERN was involved with
both, so I would guess he's a GPO employee.

1: [http://blynken.blogspot.com/2009/11/health-care-bill-geek-
st...](http://blynken.blogspot.com/2009/11/health-care-bill-geek-style.html)

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smt88
> _how do tens to hundreds of senators or representatives collaborate_

I'm actually curious to know whether this assumption is accurate. Do they
really collaborate? Do they read their own bills when they're this long? Or do
their staff handle all of this? Do they really read each other's bills? Does
one senator's staff just write a bill by itself, and then everyone else agrees
to the language? Or do they collaborate from the beginning?

I've read before that Congresspeople spend almost 100% of their time
fundraising and very little time legislating. I imagine their staff must
handle the rest.

