With the number of bills written by lobbyists and outside interests, I was wondering if there was ever a Congressional equivalent of "Are you even reading this?" slipped in like a high school essay?
With the number of bills written by lobbyists and outside interests,
While third parties often suggest text and lobby for specific provisions, at the federal level in the United States bill text itself is usually prepared by the House and Senate Office of Legislative Council. Drafts (and usually amendments) go through a number of professional editors and legal reviews there before being introduced by a member. Those that are not done by Leg Council (like drafts and edits done during committee markups and private meetings) are generally done by professional staffers who risk being fired for not taking the process seriously. The bills are also prepared and formatted at various points by the House and Senate Clerk's office of legislative operations.
What you're referring with bills being written by lobbyists is known as "model legislation" and is much more common at the state level. To be clear, third parties might ask for specific amendment text, or ask for a bill covering certain specific items to be introduced, but full plain text of bills is not provided by third parties at the Federal Level.
I was wondering if there was ever a Congressional equivalent of "Are you even reading this?" slipped in like a high school essay?
Modern legislative-council style drafting started at the federal level in 1919. Hopefully someone with more historical expertise can chime in, but I'm unaware of any instances of jokes or easter eggs in the prior period that made it into a final copy.
Despite the common perception that legislators don't read bills, every bill and resolution that actually passes is read by dozens of legislative and committee staffers, as well as staff of the chambers themselves who are responsible for things like typesetting and to be sure that the bills are compliant with existing laws. Bill text is rarely written by hand by a member in the way many people envision.
It would be very unlikely for an 'easter egg' clause to slip through in the modern era.
Although it doesn't exactly fit the letter of your question, one notable place where everyone involved tries to be a little cheeky is in the acronyms for the bill popular titles.
Sources:
Expertise: I founded a company that processes legislative data, and my wife and I have both worked in the past to advocate on specific bills at the federal level, and participated in the legislative process.
I did a brief search, and couldn't find anything that suggests this has ever happened - this doesn't mean that it hasn't, but it's extraordinarily unlikely.
To add a bit of context to the answer provided by /u/loverollercoaster as to why that's the case, the mostly likely way someone could have done so would have been to insert something into one of the book-length omnibus bills, but those really didn't start becoming routine until the 1950s and outright commonplace until the 1970s once staff became far more involved.
I think it was Richard Norton Smith who made the observation that Gerald Ford was the last President who comprehended the budget enough so that he could explain individual line items, which partially stemmed from his long years in the House doing so as part of his job in leadership - but also because the process had changed so much over the years with budget bills getting thicker and thicker that it's really been delegated to staff in both branches. This also explains why it would be quite improbable for someone to insert a 'Haha, you missed this!' line: while a member of Congress might survive the uproar if they got caught putting something like that in a bill - they'd have made their leadership look like a bunch of morons - a staffer who missed it (or even worse, put it in themselves) would be shown the door immediately and likely never work in the field again.
What's been commonplace since the beginnings of the Republic, though, is for members to put obscure amendments into bills in which almost no one actually understands the implications of passing them. Perhaps the most infamous of these was the so-called Crime of '73, in which thanks to some clever lobbying (involving probable payoffs to a couple government officials during the process), by one of the owners of the Comstock Mines, William Ralston, silver was demonetized domestically. On the surface, this was actually a pretty clever move on his part at the time; a provision allowing the use of silver for international trade to the Far East was inserted, which was intended to preserve the value of the Comstock lode since silver arriving from outside the United States that might be used to do so had significant transportation costs added to it. The underlying bill was largely non-controversial and passed 110-13 in the House and by voice vote in the Senate.
It's not clear that even Ralston had any idea at the time as to the powderkeg he was setting off (hence why the moniker of the Crime is a bit misleading), but the resulting backhanded push of the United States fully onto the gold standard morphed into one of if not the most central and vicious political debates of the Gilded Age - all because nobody had really understood that the presumably innocuous technical bill that they were voting on would have drastic and far reaching implications for the next 60 years well beyond simply not allowing for the exchange of a rapidly rising silver supply for gold.