Yahoo News39%
Congress might make daylight saving time permanent. Experts say another approach could be even better. 19%
By Mike Bebernes16%
7/15/2026, 11:22:38 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 33 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Post Hoc (False Cause), and Confirmation Bias, with Appeal to Authority as the most egregious example at 22.8% saturation with 368 hits. Analysis detected 3,219 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,615 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 34.1% and a BS Rank of 19% (12,950 of 15,985 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 81.00% of the article peer group.
The House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a bill that would make daylight saving time permanent throughout the United States, marking a major step forward in a longstanding effort to end the time changes Americans endure twice a year.
The bill, called the Sunshine Protection Act, must now be approved by the Senate before it can become law.
Plans to enact permanent daylight saving time have been proposed in some form every year for nearly a decade, but the idea may finally have the votes to become a reality thanks to broad bipartisan support and vocal backing from President Trump.
"It's time that people can stop worrying about the 'Clock,' not to mention all of the work and money that is spent on this ridiculous, twice yearly production," the president wrote on Truth Social in May.
Daylight saving time was first adopted during World War I in an effort to conserve energy, but it didn't become the norm nationwide until the 1960s.
Today, every state except Hawaii and Arizona "springs forward" one hour in March before "falling back" an hour to what's known as standard time in mid-November.
Americans have never been fully content with having to change their clocks twice a year.
In polls dating back to the 1940s, a majority of respondents have said they prefer a system that sticks to one time all year round — though there has been disagreement over whether daylight saving time or standard time should be permanent.
The U.S. has tried permanent daylight saving time before.
Congress passed a law that suspended the "fall back" in 1974, but public opinion turned so sharply against the idea once it was enacted — dropping from 79% support to 42% in just three months — that the experiment was abruptly ended the following year.
Most countries don't practice daylight saving time and many of the other nations that once did have abandoned it in recent decades.
Daylight saving time doesn't actually create more daylight, of course.
It simply adjusts the clocks so an hour of daylight that would normally occur in the early morning instead occurs in the evening.
Scientists have studied the effects of daylight saving time on our health, public safety, the economy and a wide range of other issues for decades.
They generally agree that the problem is the time change itself, creating ripple effects as people's bodies adjust to lost sleep and disruptions to their circadian rhythms.
Experts widely agree that ending the twice-yearly clock changes would be a good thing.
There's debate, though, over how big the benefits would be and which areas of society would be most affected.
Critics of the move say that permanent daylight saving time would result in late sunrises at winter, forcing children in many parts of the country to go to school in darkness.
The bill is still likely to be opposed by Sen.
Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, and others.
However, Democratic Representative Frank Pallone said on Tuesday that lifestyles have changed significantly in recent decades, with fewer children walking to school.
"It's time to finally end the process of springing forward and falling back," he said.
Here's a rundown of the potential effects of ending the time changes and why some of the most prominent experts in the field say the U.S. would be making the wrong choice by making daylight saving time permanent.
Health
Isolating the effects of the time change from all the other things that affect our health has proven challenging for researchers, but a wide variety of studies have shown an increase in negative health impacts in the days after the clocks change.
The American Heart Association says that scientists "don't really know exactly" why, but researchers have found a "modest but significant" increase in heart attacks in the days after the spring time change and a smaller, but still noteworthy, spike in strokes during those same periods.
The best explanation for these increases is the way changing the clocks disrupts circadian rhythms, creating stress in the body that can trigger major cardiac events, according to the AHA.
The time change has also been linked to obesity, in part because it can disrupt normal eating routines when people get hungry at different times of the day.
In most studies, the overall health effects are relatively small, but even minor shifts can make a big difference when scaled across the entire population.
Researchers at Stanford estimated that adopting permanent standard time all year could result in 300,000 fewer strokes and 2.6 million fewer people with obesity.
Mental health appears to take a hit as well when the clocks change.
"There seems to be more depression, anxiety, and even suicidal thoughts around the time the clock changes both in March and in the fall," David Merrill, an adult and geriatric psychiatrist, told Health last month.
At least two studies have found a small uptick in suicides associated with the time changes, though both relied on data sets that were too limited to draw broad conclusions.
The time change has also been linked to an increase in potentially dangerous errors by medical professionals who may be less alert after having their sleep schedules thrown out of whack.
Crime
Some studies suggest that having an extra hour of sunlight in the evening can reduce crime.
A 2015 study from the Brookings Institution found a 27% drop in robberies in the evening hour that would otherwise have been dark without daylight saving time — enough to bring the overall daily robbery rate down by 7%.
A Stanford study from a few years earlier found additional declines in murders and rapes.
Both sets of researchers gave a simple explanation: It's harder to commit crimes when the sun is shining and daylight saving time moves sunlight to a time of day when the highest number of people are outside.
The economy
Things start to get murkier when you shift to more complex areas that can't be measured as directly as health and crime.
Shifting the clocks by an hour logically benefits some businesses, like retail stores and restaurants, but also hurts others — particularly certain agricultural industries.
Some researchers have found a measurable decline in stock market returns associated with the time change, though others have disputed those findings.
Overall, there's no real consensus on whether the various direct effects of daylight saving time are good for economic activity or not.
One analysis estimated that the increases in heart attacks and strokes alone cost the economy about $626 million per year.
Car accidents
The number one reason the U.S. gave up its trial of permanent daylight saving time in the 1970s was due to concerns over road safety, specifically that later sunrises had led to an increase in children being hit by cars on their way to school.
Even though the government later found no evidence that such an increase had occurred, the outcry was enough to compel Congress to bring back the biannual time changes.
Concerns about car accidents are still a major part of the debate over daylight saving time.
Logically, it makes certain sense that drivers who have had less sleep or who are suddenly driving in the dark might make more mistakes, but the research is mixed.
One group of researchers concluded that time transitions "do not cause" more car accidents.
Another found that crashes declined after the "spring forward" but increased after "fall back."
A third study that looked only at fatal crashes found that the spring time change was more dangerous for motorists, while pedestrians and cyclists were killed more frequently after clocks reset in the fall.
Energy
The original basis for daylight saving time was to save electricity during World War I.
Permanent daylight saving time was adopted in the '70s, in part to reduce gas consumption during the oil crisis.
But modern research has suggested that the time change has little, if any, effect on how much energy we use.
Electricity consumption decreases by about 0.34% during daylight saving time, according to a 2018 meta-analysis that looked at the results of dozens of studies on the issue.
The same appears to be true with gas.
In 2008, the U.S.
Department of Energy found no significant changes to gasoline consumption related to daylight saving time.
Other impacts
Over the decades, researchers have studied a wide range of other effects of daylight saving time.
Various studies have found time changes may cause kids to spend more time outside, make TV ratings drop and generally make people less giving.
A spring forward in the wrong direction?
Experts widely agree that ending time changes is the most important way to solve the biggest problems caused by daylight saving time.
But there is also a broad consensus among experts that making daylight saving time permanent is the wrong approach.
The American Medical Association, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and many leading researchers in the field all argue that permanent standard time is the much better solution.
Stanford scientists recently found that permanent daylight saving time would only bring about two-thirds of the benefits as permanent standard time.
"When you get light in the morning, it speeds up the circadian cycle.
When you get light in the evening, it slows things down," Jamie Zeitzer, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford said.
"You generally need more morning light and less evening light to keep well synchronized to a 24-hour day."
A proposal to amend the Sunshine Protection Act so it would establish permanent standard time in accordance with expert guidance was voted down by the House Rules Committee on Tuesday.
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.