How a Bill Becomes a Law, and Why It Takes Longer Than Our Page Load

Our homepage loads in about eight tenths of a second. We are quite proud of this. We optimized the images, we inlined the critical styles, and we removed a font that nobody was going to notice.

The average federal bill that becomes law takes somewhere north of 263 days.

As a person who spent a full afternoon shaving 200 milliseconds off a page, this initially struck us as an outrage. Then we looked at what the 263 days are actually made of, and we came away with a more complicated feeling.

The process, roughly: someone writes it. It goes to a committee, where it is read by people whose entire job is that specific subject. It gets marked up — which is to say, argued over, line by line, by professionals who are being paid to find the part that is wrong. It goes to a floor. It gets amended. It goes to the other chamber, where a completely different set of people, with different incentives, do the whole thing again. Then the two versions have to be reconciled, which is its own negotiation. Then it gets signed. Or it does not.

Here is what struck us. Almost none of that time is idle. It is review. It is deliberate, adversarial, structurally-mandated review, performed by parties who disagree, over text that will bind three hundred million people for decades.

We ship code to production in eleven minutes. Twice this year that has gone badly.

Speed is a virtue when the cost of being wrong is a rollback. It is a much stranger virtue when the cost of being wrong is a law that outlives everyone who voted for it. The Founders were, if anything, trying to make this slow. Bicameralism is friction on purpose. The whole architecture is a set of speed bumps installed by people who had recently watched a government move quickly and had not enjoyed it.

We are not going to slow down our page load. Eight tenths of a second is good and we want the credit.

But we have stopped being annoyed at the 263 days.