The House passed a bill to lock the clocks on daylight saving time for good, and President Trump is personally lobbying senators to follow, but the upper chamber may not have the votes.
Come November 1, most Americans will do what they have done every fall for decades: drag themselves out of bed, find the microwave clock blinking the wrong number, and set everything back one hour. At 2 a.m. local time that Sunday, daylight saving time ends, and standard time returns. The ritual continues because Congress, despite broad public support for ending it, has not finished the job.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill in July 2026 to make daylight saving time permanent, no more falling back, no more springing forward. President Trump backs the effort and has been personally calling lawmakers to push it across the finish line. "Hopefully the Senate's going to approve that one," Trump said. But Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, has questioned whether the measure can clear his chamber, USA TODAY reported.
This is not the first time the Senate has touched the issue. The Sunshine Protection Act of 2022 actually passed the Senate that year. It went nowhere in the House at the time. Now the roles are reversed: the House has acted, and the Senate is the bottleneck.
Thune has not said the bill is dead. He has raised doubts about the vote count. No direct public statement from the majority leader explaining his concerns appears in the current reporting, and the bill's exact status in committee or on the Senate calendar remains unclear. That ambiguity is itself a signal. When leadership wants a bill on the floor, it gets on the floor.
Trump's willingness to work the phones shows he sees permanent daylight saving time as more than a novelty issue. The president is spending political capital on it, calling individual politicians, not just issuing a statement. Whether that pressure moves enough Senate votes is the open question heading into the fall.
Public opinion runs heavily against the twice-a-year time switch. A 2023 YouGov survey found 62% of Americans favored eliminating the changes altogether. A Gallup poll from January 2025 put the number at 54% who wanted to end daylight saving time.
But the polls reveal a split that complicates the politics. Gallup found 48% of Americans preferred year-round standard time, the winter schedule, with earlier sunrises and earlier sunsets. Only 24% wanted permanent daylight saving time, which is what the House bill and Trump's push would deliver. The majority who want to stop changing clocks do not agree on which clock to keep.
That gap gives senators cover to hesitate. A vote for permanent daylight saving time satisfies the "stop switching" crowd but runs against the larger share that prefers standard time. A vote against it lets a senator say he listened to the science and the polls, without actually solving anything.
Erik Herzog, a biology and neuroscience professor at Washington University in St. Louis and former president of the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms, has previously told USA TODAY that permanent standard time would be the healthiest option. Herzog has said the clock changes disrupt circadian rhythms, the body's internal schedule for sleep, alertness, and organ function.
The spring shift, when clocks jump forward and people lose an hour of sleep, has been linked to increases in heart attacks and car crashes. The fall change is less disruptive because the body gains an hour, but the back-and-forth itself is the problem researchers flag.
The health argument cuts against the specific bill Trump supports. Scientists in the field broadly prefer locking in standard time, not daylight saving time. Congress could end the switching without picking the option the House chose, but that would require a different bill, a different coalition, and more delay.
Hawaii and most of Arizona already skip daylight saving time and stay on standard time year-round. The Navajo Nation, which spans parts of Arizona, is an exception within the state. Several U.S. territories, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, also do not observe the switch.
For the rest of the country, the pattern holds: clocks spring forward on the second Sunday in March and fall back on the first Sunday in November. That schedule is set by federal law, and only Congress can change it.
The November 1 deadline is now three months away. If the Senate does not act before then, Americans will reset their clocks again, and the debate will roll into 2027, marking yet another year in which Washington agreed the problem existed and failed to fix it.
Trump is doing his part. The House did its part. The Senate owes the country a vote, one way or the other, and the longer it stalls, the harder it becomes to argue that the institution still works on even the simplest questions.
