On Tuesday, March 15, the Senate, without a hearing or debate, unanimously passed the Sunshine Protection Act, a bill to make daylight savings permanent. If it passes in the House and is signed by President Biden, Americans will no longer have to set their clocks back an hour in the late fall and lose an hour of daylight for four and a half months until early Spring. If passed, it would also mean that mornings would be darker. It is also important to note that the bill will not come into effect until November 2023, in order to give time to transportation industries like airlines to adjust. 

Senator Marco Rubio (R-F.L.), who was the leading legislator behind the bill, argued that there would be an array of benefits from the legislation, including giving students more time for afterschool recreational activities as well as combating seasonal affective disorder. He stated, “clock switching [causes] an increase in heart attacks, car accidents and pedestrian accidents,” and that “in a country we desperately want our kids outside, playing, doing sports, not just to sit in front of a TV playing video games all day. It gets tough in many parts of the country to be able to do that. What ends up happening is for the 16 weeks of the year, if you don’t have a park or outdoor facility with lights, you’re basically shut down at 5 p.m., in some cases 4 p.m.” 

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), said the bill’s passage would be welcomed by people in his home state: “Pretty much everybody in Rhode Island experiences the same thing on that unhappy day in early November, when suddenly an hour of your day, an hour of your daylight disappears and dusk comes an hour earlier. “It does darken our lives in a very literal sense and by the time you get from November when we fall back to the shortest day of the year [on December 21st], we have sunset in Rhode Island at 4:15. That means everybody is driving home if they work regular nine-to-five hours they’re driving home in the pitch dark. So, let’s make it 5:15. Granted, there are people who are up between 6:30 and 7:30 in the morning who will then miss their hour of daylight but there are a lot fewer people up and about between 6:30 and 7:30 in the morning than there are between 4:15 and 5:15 in the afternoon.”

However, the bill is already facing controversy. While a poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that nearly 75% of Americans favor an end to daylight savings time, many sleep experts do not. Studies have found that permanent standard time, not savings time, actually aligns better with the human sleep cycle, which in turn boosts health. Dr. Beth Malow, a professor of neurology and the director of the sleep division at Vanderbilt Medical Center, explains that standard time is the “more natural time because the additional sun in the morning tells human brains it’s time to wake up, while the lack of evening light encourages sleep. During daylight savings time, you’re getting too much light in the evening and not enough in the morning.” Erik Herzog, a chronobiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, adds to Dr. Malow’s perspective, stating that “the shift in time isn’t only about sleep. You have a daily rhythm in every hormone in your body, independent of whether you’re sleeping or not. Humans’ natural internal clock is a little longer than the Earth’s 24 hours, and that light in the morning is really important for the human circadian clock to adjust to the 24-hour clock. Otherwise, people experience circadian disruptions correlated with many negative effects, including higher rates of cancer and obesity.”

There are also other concerns regarding the bill. States like Arizona that already struggle with afternoon heat may experience even worse heat as a result of longer working hours in the daylight. As the House has not yet announced plans to take up the bill, only time will tell as to which side the representatives will take. Will they realize and speak up if their state is disproportionately affected by the bill, or will those who will reap most of the benefits of the bill win with little pushback, like they did in the Senate?