Science — Noozify Original — October 29, 2026

Where the Push to End Daylight Saving Time Stands

By Dan Chafetz

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At 2 a.m. this coming Sunday, November 1st, most Americans will turn their clocks back an hour, just as they have every autumn for decades. Yet on Capitol Hill, a bill to end that tradition has already cleared one chamber of Congress, and the odd thing is that almost no one disputes the goal. What the country cannot settle is a subtler question: which hour, exactly, should we freeze in place? The real debate is not whether to stop switching but which clock to keep for good, standard time or daylight saving time.

Let us begin with the matter of status, because the headlines can be misleading. The Sunshine Protection Act is not law, and nothing is ending yet. The House passed it 308 to 117 on July 14th, and it has since been referred to the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, where it sits. Unless the Senate acts and the president signs, the clocks will change on schedule this weekend and again in March.

It helps to understand what the bill actually does. It would not abolish daylight saving time; it would make it permanent, so that the "summer" clock stays on year-round and standard time effectively disappears. States such as Hawaii and most of Arizona, which already keep standard time all year, would not be forced to switch. In that sense the movement to "end daylight saving time" is a bit of a misnomer, since it would end the switching by making the switched-to hour the permanent one.

The legislative effort has a recognizable cast. Florida Representative Vern Buchanan has introduced the bill in every Congress since 2018, and Senator Rick Scott, also of Florida, carries the Senate version with 18 cosponsors. Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, an original cosponsor, joined Scott's push for a quick vote last year. Buchanan has called ending the clock change "a commonsense reform" that would improve everyday life for millions.

President Trump has made himself the bill's most prominent champion. Writing on Truth Social after a House committee advanced the bill in May, he promised to push for the measure and argued that Americans prefer "a longer, brighter Day." He has also complained that the twice-yearly change costs cities and states money.

The case against the status quo is stronger than most of us assume. Researchers have tied the transitions themselves to more heart attacks, strokes, medical errors, and traffic incidents, and surveys consistently find that a majority of Americans would rather stop switching. Advocates of the permanent summer hour add that bright evenings encourage recreation and commerce, and one widely cited economics study found that the extra evening light cut robberies by about 7 percent. Florida Representative Gus Bilirakis put the commercial argument plainly, saying that in a tourism state like Florida, more predictable daylight helps workers, businesses, and visitors.

Here is where the story takes its first odd turn. The Senate actually passed this very idea in 2022, by unanimous consent, and then many senators admitted they hadn't realized it was happening. The House never took it up, and the bill expired.

The second turn is stranger, because the strongest opposition does not come from people who like changing their clocks. It comes from sleep scientists, who argue that if we must change to one permanent year-round time format, we should instead stop on standard time, which better matches the body's circadian rhythm. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine has said so in a formal position statement, and a 2025 Stanford Medicine study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated that permanent standard time would mean roughly 2.6 million fewer people with obesity and 300,000 fewer strokes. Permanent daylight time helped too, the authors found, only to a lesser degree.

Then there is the matter of what Americans have already tried. Congress imposed year-round daylight time in January 1974 as an energy measure, and by October of that year it had ended the experiment early after parents protested children waiting for school buses in the dark. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton has built his case on exactly that memory, and last October, when Scott sought a quick Senate vote, Cotton blocked it.

This month, Trump publicly named Cotton as the lone obstacle. Cotton, who says he dislikes changing clocks too, answered that Congress had tried permanent daylight time before and repealed it "once Americans experienced absurdly late sunrises in the winter."

What makes the standoff difficult to resolve is that it follows geography more than party. Senators of both parties back the change, while Montana's Steve Daines has warned that winter sunrises in western Montana would come close to 9:30 a.m. As one Senate leader put it, the impact depends on where a senator lives.

We ran the numbers for Austin, Texas, using NOAA's solar position formulas. Under permanent daylight time, the sun would come up after 8 a.m. on 100 days a year, as late as 8:28 a.m. in early January, compared with a latest sunrise of 7:49 a.m. under today's rules. Under permanent standard time, the summer evenings shrink instead, with July's latest sunset moving from 8:37 p.m. to 7:37 p.m. and June sunrises coming as early as 5:28 a.m. Austin sits farther south than most of the country, so its winter mornings are milder than western Montana's, and it would still give up an hour of light at one end of the day or the other.

As of today, then, the bill is stalled. The Senate is out until after the November midterms, and must-pass spending bills will likely crowd its calendar when it returns. A bill not enacted by the end of this Congress has to be introduced all over again, which Buchanan has already done five times.

So the question that opened this story has an unresolved answer. Americans have never really disagreed about whether to stop changing the clocks; they disagree about whether the morning or the evening deserves the light, and the answer shifts with latitude and longitude. We tried one answer in 1974 and retreated within the year, which may be the real reason the clock keeps turning this weekend, while Congress argues about when to stop it.