Sleep Scientists Wanted the Other Daylight Saving Bill

On July 14, 2026, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 139, the Sunshine Protection Act, 308 to 117. The bill would end the twice-yearly clock change and lock the country onto the time currently observed from March to November, with states allowed to opt out and stay on standard time instead. President Trump has said publicly he wants it on his desk and has pushed the Senate for a floor date. The bill is now sitting in a chamber that left for its August recess without touching it. Where that specific bill stands procedurally, separate from the health argument made here, is worth checking before assuming House passage means much of anything yet.

The sales pitch writes itself: later sunsets, more usable evening light, an end to the twice-a-year ritual of resetting every clock in the house. It sounds like an unambiguous quality-of-life upgrade, and 308 House members, spanning both parties, backed it like it was one.

The professional body that actually studies sleep for a living disagrees, and not about whether the clock-switching should stop. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine has opposed permanent Daylight Saving Time by name, while separately calling for the twice-yearly change to end. Its position, reaffirmed in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine in 2023, is permanent standard time. Once the bill cleared the House, AASM president Dr. Fariha Abbasi-Feinberg said the chamber “ignored the overwhelming evidence supporting the health and safety benefits of permanent standard time and instead chose to force dark, dangerous mornings on millions of Americans who will suffer the effects.” The fuller case behind that statement, plus practical advice for the transitions themselves, is its own subject; what follows here stays on the specific bill now sitting in the Senate.

Why does the direction of the clock change matter, not just the switching?

Because the human circadian clock resets itself daily using light, and morning light does most of that work. Circadian entrainment is the process by which an internal rhythm that runs slightly longer than 24 hours gets pulled back into sync with the outside world, and the strongest pull comes from bright light hitting the eyes shortly after waking. Standard time keeps clock time closer to solar time, so morning light shows up close to when most people’s alarms already go off. Permanent Daylight Saving Time pushes clock time an hour ahead of the sun year-round, which means winter mornings stay dark an hour longer, every year, indefinitely, not just for a groggy week after the switch.

Newsweek’s mapped calculations of the bill’s effect, published after the House passed it, put the winter solstice sunrise in Roanoke, Virginia at 8:28 a.m. under permanent DST. Multiply that kind of delay across the northern and western edges of every time zone and you get a lot of commutes, school runs, and first work hours happening before the sun is up, for roughly a third of the year, on a schedule that never resets back.

Is this really scientists versus Congress?

Not cleanly, which is the part the House’s 308-117 margin obscures. Senate Majority Leader John Thune opposed similar legislation in the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, citing the same problem AASM cites: winter sunrises that would arrive too late in South Dakota. Senator Steve Daines has said the bill won’t “see the light of day” in the Senate. Senator Tom Cotton has repeatedly blocked attempts to pass a permanent-DST bill by unanimous consent, arguing it would take away morning sunshine that people need for safety. None of these three are sleep researchers. They’re Republican senators making, in different words, the AASM’s argument, against a bill their own House colleagues passed with bipartisan support and their own president is actively pressuring them to sign.

That split runs through the House too, in the form of a second bill. Nine days before the Sunshine Protection Act passed, Representatives Mary Gay Scanlon (D-PA) and Pat Harrigan (R-NC) introduced H.R. 9638, the Sunshine for Our Kids Act, which does close to the opposite: permanent standard time, with states given the option to opt into Daylight Saving Time on their own if they want it. AASM has publicly backed that bill. Neither chamber has to choose between “keep switching the clocks” and “stop switching them.” As of this writing, there are two live bills proposing to stop the switching in opposite directions, and the one further along is the one the professional sleep-medicine body says gets the physiology backward.

Has permanent Daylight Saving Time been tried before?

Once, briefly, and it did not go well. In January 1974, under a bill President Nixon signed as an energy-conservation measure during the oil crisis, the country went onto permanent Daylight Saving Time. Public support started high, around 79 percent in early polling. By February, as winter mornings stayed dark past 8 a.m. in much of the country, support had fallen to roughly 42 percent, and multiple fatal accidents involving schoolchildren walking to school before sunrise, several of them in Florida, turned the policy into a political liability. Congress reversed course that October, and the country was back on the seasonal switch by the following spring. The experiment lasted ten months of an intended two years.

It’s a limited data point: one winter, one set of energy-crisis conditions, fifty years of car and school-safety changes since. It’s not proof that 2026 would repeat 1974 exactly. But it’s the one time the country actually ran this policy rather than modeled it, and the pattern the sleep scientists describe in the abstract, dark mornings creating real safety problems for people who have no say in when their commute or school bell starts, is close to the pattern that showed up the last time anyone tried it.

What happens next?

Unresolved, honestly. The Senate is out until September, and neither its majority leader’s public skepticism nor Trump’s public pressure has produced a floor date yet. Whether the chamber ends up voting on the Sunshine Protection Act, the Sunshine for Our Kids Act, both, or neither before the clocks fall back on November 1 is not something anyone outside the Senate cloakroom currently knows, and this piece isn’t going to pretend otherwise.

What’s already decided is smaller than the headline number suggests: a majority of one chamber agreed the twice-yearly switch should end. Which direction the country ends up parked in, and whether the people who study sleep for a living get the outcome their own research points to, is still an open question sitting in a recessed Senate rather than a settled one sitting in a signed bill.