House Passes Sunshine Protection Act to Make Daylight Saving Time Permanent

Article excerpt

After decades of twice-yearly clock complaints, the House of Representatives passed the Sunshine Protection Act, a bipartisan bill that would lock the country permanently onto daylight saving time and end the spring-forward, fall-back ritual Americans have observed since World War I. The vote marks Congress's most concrete move yet on an issue that polls consistently show most Americans want resolved. The bill now travels to the Senate, where a nearly identical measure passed unanimously in 2022 only to die quietly in the House without ever getting a floor vote. Scott Yates of the Lock the Clock Alliance, one of the more persistent advocacy voices on this issue, has argued that the biannual switch carries measurable costs: upticks in traffic accidents, heart attacks, and lost productivity in the days following each transition. The choice of which permanent time to keep is its own argument. Proponents of permanent daylight saving time want the longer evening light; advocates for permanent standard time, backed by most sleep researchers, say standard time better aligns with the sun's natural arc and human circadian rhythms. What Congress is deciding, in other words, isn't just convenience. It's which kind of darkness Americans will wake up to every winter morning for the foreseeable future.