On July 14, the House of Representatives passed the Sunshine Protection Act (“SPA”) by a vote of 308 to 117. The bill would abolish the twice-yearly clock change by imposing Daylight Saving Time (“DST”) year-round, nationwide. President Trump has promised to sign it. Thankfully, it has stalled in the Senate, where it has met opposition, including Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas who, warning the bill would “push winter sunrises to an absurdly late hour,” has urged leadership not to bring it to the floor.
Good. Because before this bill goes any further, its proponents should be made to answer a question they have so far dodged: why should the clock be set away from the sun in the first place?
Standard time isn’t an arbitrary convention. It is calibrated, roughly, to solar noon, the moment the sun is highest in the sky. It’s the baseline, the clock’s honest report of where the sun is. DST is the deviation: a government-mandated, deliberate misstatement of solar time. The burden of proof therefore rests on those who want the deviation at all — much less to make it permanent, including in the dead of winter, when mornings are darkest.
Tellingly, the bill’s drafters and supporters, unable to meet their burden of proof, resort to a familiar repertoire of fallacies.
First, the bill’s drafters tried to define the problem away. The SPA doesn’t merely extend DST; its text declares DST to be the new “standard time.” That’s not reform. That’s remaking the ruler to sanction deliberate bias in measurement.
Second, reliance on opinion polls. Yes, majorities say they hate changing their clocks. But “should we stop the switching” is a different question from “which time convention should be permanent,” and the bill’s supporters routinely conflate the two. When pollsters force the choice, the country splits more evenly. Moreover, stated preferences for “daylight” time, it turns out, don’t survive many long, dark winter mornings.
We know, because we already ran this experiment. In 1974, responding to the energy crisis, Congress imposed nationwide permanent DST. Public support stood at 79 percent when the law took effect. Within a couple months — after a January of pitch-dark school bus stops, sleepy-eyed commutes, and reports of children struck by cars in the morning blackness — support collapsed to 42 percent. Congress repealed the scheme before the next winter. The people who assure us today that Americans will love permanent DST are asking us to believe that, somehow, it will be different this time.
Third, the name-calling. DST-skeptics are dismissed as fusspots and luddites thwarting an “extra hour” of sunshine. But there is no extra sunshine. Congress cannot legislate longer days any more than it can repeal winter. Every minute of evening light the SPA “protects” is a minute confiscated from the morning. The Sunshine Protection Act protects zero minutes of sunshine; it only moves them — and the bill’s name is designed to obscure where they came from.
Fourth and silliest, the wishful thinking. Confronted with the health and safety costs of dark winter mornings, proponents breezily reply that everyone can simply adjust — shift schedules, wake later, start school later. Set aside that no individual can “adjust” alone: your schedule is chained to your employer’s, your children’s schools, the market’s opening bell. Notice instead what the argument concedes. If everyone shifted their schedules an hour later, activity would simply re-anchor to the sun, and the cherished “extra evening hour” would evaporate. The clock numbers would change; life, in the long term, would not. At which point — one has to ask — would DST’s champions demand yet another hour? Argue about this topic long enough, and you learn that the argument was never about the clock.
Daylight is a form of wealth. Morning sunlight, in particular, is an asset for human health: it synchronizes the human circadian clock, which is why the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and allied scientific bodies endorse permanent standardtime, not permanent DST. Researchers have observed worse health outcomes, from sleep deficits to elevated disease rates, on the western edges of time zones, where clock time strays furthest from solar time. Morning light is also an asset for safety: for children at bus stops, workers on the early shift, and commuters on icy roads.
The SPA is a scheme to redistribute that wealth, from the people least able to “adjust” — schoolchildren, tradesmen, nurses, anyone whose day starts early and isn’t negotiable — to evening industries that have lobbied for DST expansions for decades. When Congress extended DST in 1986, the golf industry alone projected a windfall in the hundreds of millions, and retailers and convenience stores cheered alongside. The other windfall recipients are those who prefer evening light and are willing to trade their health for it — many without ever being aware there is a trade-off, since the bill’s marketing insists the hour is free.
It isn’t free. Nothing government redistributes ever is.
Senator Cotton, last October, put the stakes plainly: permanent DST would “make winter a dark and dismal time for millions of Americans.” After the 2022 version of this bill slipped through the Senate due to a staff miscommunication, Cotton has vowed to oppose any bill making DST permanent. He should. As should his colleagues, of both parties.
Let’s end the biannual clock change. But let’s end it in the only direction the sun, the science, and recent history endorse: permanent standard time. The clock should tell the truth about where the sun is. Congress can’t “protect” sunshine — it can only redistribute it from your morning to someone else’s evening. Until Congress can advance permanent standard time legislation, it should leave things as they are.
Related: “The Eleven-inch Foot,” about Congress’s (lack of) authority to regulate clock settings away from mean solar noon.
Don't Let It Go 