Names of bills nowadays have little to do with their content. Maybe we should just get rid of names altogether and refer to them by SHA hashes of their content...

"Some moron amended bill f7eed03, now it's bill f5ba821. Do you know how much I had to tweak the language in order to generate a hash that looks like 'freedom'?"

Why not refer to the bill as H.R.3361.

For anyone interested, here is the bill in question: https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/3361

Hashes would make it a lot easier to detect sneaky last-minute changes.

At the same time, though, you lose the thread if you miss any "X is the next version of Y" update. Probably HR-number-hash would be ideal.

or maybe just 'version numbers'.

HR3361.4 HR3361.5 HR3361.6

etc

Easier for everyone to understand, not just geeks...

People get tempted to play shenanigans like reusing numbers.

datetime?

HR3361.20141106142502

almost as bad as hash, but immediately parseable and understood if a version was before or after something else.

Take a look at what New York City Council Member Ben Kallos is doing. He posts his legislation to GitHub so tracking changes is easy.

https://github.com/BenKallos/legislation

It's a unique approach to governing that I wish more would follow.