I’m just curious if it is possible to have a bill with five or ten pages max? Are there things that need to be included that I don’t know about?
The short answers are, no, and yes.
The exact purpose of congress is to tax the people and to spend that money for the general welfare of their constituents and the country as a whole. And since the sums of money collected and then spent are astronomical* and the nature of where the tax revenue comes from can determine where the money can be spent. So a great deal of the language of any bill, which almost always involves the spending of money (save for declaring a particular day, national mac n cheese day or whatever) must be devoted to specifying how much gets spent, where the money comes from, and under the auspices of which authorities to spent each appropriation falls. In most cases, spending money is required to be deficit neutral so any appropriation for one bill must decrease the spending somewhere else. The alternative is to fund a bill by selling bonds (aka borrowing the money) which, likewise, requires a great deal of specificity.
Then... there is a great deal of crafting to a bill to ensure it will not assault enough political or philosophical sensibilities to make it dead on arrival. So, often a bill for any sort of medical spending will include language specifically precluding any money spent by that bill from being used to provide or support family planning or being used to study the effects of gun violence, or whatever, or to make sure the money is spent in ways that promote diversity or gender equality. Even when not exactly germane to the measure at hand, coups and trophies that can be brought back to the legislator's constituents.
Lawyers like to write. And they charge by the hour.
Government lawyers are usually salaried. Unless you mean the lawyers hired by influential lobbies that often write out the framework of the bills in the first place, in which case ... yeah, I can agree with that.
* I footnoted this because it reminds me of a funny story from an econ class. It goes something like... When we describe something that is numerically enormous we often use the term Astronomical to describe it. Well there are 100 Billion stars in our galaxy, an astronomical number. But the current fiscal budget for our country is over 1 Trillion dollars (closer to 5 trillion in 2020), ten times the number of stars in the Milky Way, so if we really want to describe a huge number we should refer to it as economical instead of astronomical.
