Since 2009, developers have been able to use the ProPublica Congress API (first developed by The New York Times) to retrieve data about the thousands of bills introduced during every two-year session in the House of Representatives. Until now though, you had to download each piece of information separately, and you needed to know how to write API calls.
For example, if you wanted to discover who sponsored a bill and also how members of Congress voted on it, you would need to download those pieces of data individually, and know how to call for them in the software code.
That's no longer the case. Wednesday, ProPublica announced that you can now download all the information about all of the bills in each legislative session using its new bulk bill data set. You can get all of the data for free in the ProPublica data store. There's also a data dictionary that can be used to decipher the bills here, and you can download them in either JSON or XML formats.