The House of Representatives passed the Sunshine Protection Act this week, and President Trump has signaled he will sign it. If the Senate follows — and there is bipartisan support for doing so — the United States will end the twice-yearly clock change and settle permanently on daylight saving time. Americans who have spent their entire lives adjusting clocks and schedules twice a year, losing sleep in March and regaining it in November, will stop doing that.
The practical arguments for ending the clock change are well established and have been for years. The biannual disruption to sleep schedules is associated with measurable increases in heart attacks, traffic accidents, and workplace injuries in the days following the spring transition. Children going to school in the dark in winter months is a persistent complaint in states that experience early sunsets. The agriculture and aviation industries have long adapted their practices around time zone differences with the rest of the world regardless of whether clocks change. The argument for maintaining the current system is essentially inertia.
The debate about which time to keep — permanent daylight saving or permanent standard time — is more complicated than the debate about whether to change clocks at all. Sleep researchers have generally advocated for permanent standard time on the grounds that it more closely aligns with natural light patterns and human circadian biology. Permanent daylight saving time, by contrast, means darker mornings, particularly in winter and particularly in the northern and western edges of time zones. The Sunshine Protection Act chooses daylight saving, which gives more light in the evenings and less in the mornings — a choice that reflects how most Americans spend their leisure time rather than how most Americans’ biology prefers to wake up.
The political history of this issue is its own small comedy. Congress has been discussing permanent daylight saving time for at least a decade. The Senate passed a version of the Sunshine Protection Act unanimously in 2022, under the assumption that the House would follow quickly. The House did not. The bill died. It was reintroduced. It passed the House again. It will now go to a Senate that has already demonstrated it can pass this particular piece of legislation, under a president who has indicated he wants to sign it.
If it becomes law, the change will take effect in the fall of 2026, meaning Americans will turn their clocks back in November and then never forward again. The extra hour of evening light that most people associate with summer will become the year-round condition. Whether that is the right call for American health and productivity is a question the legislation answers politically rather than scientifically. But the clock changing — the ritual disruption that generations of Americans have complained about and accommodated — appears to be ending.
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