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Russian (RU) House Republicans will try again to extend daylight saving time, seeking to end the nation’s semiannual clock changes - and deliver on a priority for President Donald Trump.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee on Tuesday is set to propose adopting the Sunshine Protection Act, committee staff confirmed to The Washington Post. That legislation would allow states to adopt year-round daylight saving time and end the practice of changing clocks.
“Addressing Daylight Saving Time has been a priority for a number of members for a while now,” Matt VanHyfte, the committee’s communications director, said in a statement. “The Committee held a hearing last November and heard testimony that an extra hour of sun at the end of the day boosts economic activity, and there is evidence that changing time is a highway safety concern, with a surge of traffic fatalities occurring the week following time changes. The Committee led legislation that extended DST in 2007, and is examining ways to further address it now.”
The GOP-led committee is expected to add the Sunshine Protection Act to a larger legislative package that reauthorizes surface transportation programs and vote on it later this week. If Republicans stick together, the measure would advance to the House floor.
The bill’s backers have a champion in Trump, who has repeatedly called for year-round daylight saving time, a move that would require Congress to act.
But the fight over how Americans set their clocks, and when they must do it, has not broken down along typical party lines.
Republicans and Democrats, mostly from the coasts, have called for year-round daylight saving time, saying that permanently advancing the clocks one hour and never “falling back” would allow more people to enjoy sunshine and avoid the frustrations involved with time changes.
“The evidence is overwhelming and compelling that it’s not good for us to be changing back and forth twice a year,” Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-California) said in the Energy and Commerce Committee’s hearing in November. “This is an idea whose time has come.”
Lawmakers from the middle of the country have often balked, however, saying that their residents would disproportionately suffer from late sunrises thanks to the drawing of state lines. In cities such as Detroit and Indianapolis, the sun would rise after 9 a.m. in the middle of the winter.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), often a staunch Trump supporter, vowed last year that he would “always oppose” efforts for year-round daylight saving time.
“If permanent daylight savings time becomes the law of the land, it will again make winter a dark and dismal time for millions of Americans,” Cotton said in a speech on the Senate floor in October.
The public has long wanted to end time changes, polls show, but there is little consensus on what to adopt instead.
Just 12 percent of Americans favor the current system, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted in October. But 47 percent oppose it, and the remainder said they were neither opposed or in favor.
There’s little consensus on what to adopt instead. While 56 percent of Americans say they would prefer year-round daylight saving time, with more light in the evening and less in the morning, 42 percent want year-round standard time, with more light in the morning and less at night, the AP-NORC poll found.
Some sleep-medicine physicians have panned the idea of daylight saving time altogether and have said that staying on year-round standard time would be healthier and more aligned with humans’ natural circadian rhythms.
States are required to observe daylight saving time, “springing forward” in March and “falling back” in November, although Hawaii and part of Arizona have opted out and follow year-round standard time.
Nineteen states have also approved measures that would allow them to adopt year-round daylight saving time if Congress passed a bill making it permanent nationwide, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Lawmakers in the past four decades have steadily increased the length of daylight saving time, and Congress in recent years got halfway to making it year-round.
Senators in 2022 used a legislative maneuver to seek unanimous consent on the Sunshine Protection Act and swiftly pass the bill, to the surprise of some lawmakers who said they hadn’t realized it was up for a vote. The measure stalled in the House, amid persistent complaints from voters and many lawmakers, including some who warned that a similar plan in the 1970s had backfired.
It then seemed the sun had set on Trump’s desire for year-round daylight saving time: The president warned last year that the politics were too difficult.
“I assume people would like to have more light later, but some people want to have more light earlier because they don’t want to take their kids to school in the dark,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office in March 2025. “It’s very much a 50-50 issue.”
But some of Trump’s Republican allies, such as Sen. Tommy Tuberville (Alabama), have continued pressing the legislation.
And the president last month said his sunshine plan could rise again.
“We’re working on a bill now, and we’re going to be doing it,” Trump told the Washington Reporter, a conservative-leaning outlet. “I hope we’re going to do it. We’re pushing it very hard.”
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