The US moves toward permanent daylight saving time while the EU remains deadlocked over seasonal clock changes
The US House voted 308 to 117 on Tuesday to pass the Sunshine Protection Act, ending the twice-yearly clock change in favour of permanent Daylight Saving Time. The bill now moves to the Senate, where its prospects remain uncertain, and from there to a patchwork of state-level decisions that closely resembles the same coordination trap that has kept the European Union from finishing an almost identical reform it approved back in 2019.
- The US moves toward permanent daylight saving time while the EU remains deadlocked over seasonal clock changes
- Why should that structure sound familiar to anyone watching Brussels?
- The American version of the same problem
- A debate that splits the same way on both sides of the Atlantic
- An ocean apart, watching the same clock
The bill would end the practice of shifting clocks twice a year and lock the country into Daylight Saving Time year-round, the “spring forward” setting Americans currently observe from March to November. President Donald Trump has pushed for the change, calling the twice-yearly ritual costly and disruptive, though his own position on which permanent time the US should adopt, standard or daylight saving, has shifted over time. The measure allows individual states to opt out before it takes effect, a provision that would preserve standard time in places like Hawaii and most of Arizona, which do not currently observe the clock change at all.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 19 states have already passed legislation ready to switch to permanent Daylight Saving Time the moment federal law permits it. That is the detail worth pausing on. Congress is not simply choosing a national time. It is authorising a state-by-state cascade of individual decisions, each of which could, in principle, land differently.
Why should that structure sound familiar to anyone watching Brussels?
The European Parliament passed its own measure to end mandatory clock changes in March 2019, by an even wider margin, 410 to 192, with a target implementation date of 2021. The EU’s directive followed the same logic as the American bill: rather than dictating a single outcome, it would let each member state choose whether to settle permanently on summer time or winter time.
That flexibility, intended to respect national preference, is exactly what has kept the reform frozen for six years. The European Council never reached the coordinated agreement the directive required, and by 2025, the European Commission was signalling it might simply withdraw the proposal altogether rather than continue trying to broker it.
The reason is geography as much as politics. The EU spans three time zones, and permanent summer time would push winter sunrise past 9 a.m. in parts of Belgium and Denmark, and close to 10 a.m. in northwestern Spain, while permanent winter time would mean summer sunrises before 4 a.m. in Berlin and eastern Poland. Neighbouring countries choosing opposite defaults could put France and Germany, or Germany and Poland, on different clocks year-round, creating exactly the kind of cross-border scheduling friction the current uniform system was built to prevent.
The American version of the same problem
The United States does not share the EU’s raw time-zone sprawl, but it inherits a milder version of the same fragmentation risk. Nineteen states are pre-committed to permanent Daylight Saving Time, but that list is not comprehensive or contiguous, and nothing in the bill compels neighbouring, economically linked states to make the same choice at the same time. A state that opts for standard time while its neighbour adopts Daylight Saving Time would, in effect, create the same one-hour cross-border seam that has stalled the EU’s own effort, just at a smaller scale.
Congress has direct experience with how quickly this kind of change can go wrong. In 1974, facing an energy crisis, lawmakers adopted permanent Daylight Saving Time nationally. The experiment lasted barely a year before overwhelming public backlash, driven largely by parents reporting children waiting for school buses in pitch-black winter mornings, forced a reversal. Opponents of the current bill invoke that episode regularly, and the same substantive argument resurfaced in this week’s House debate, with lawmakers from agricultural and northern districts warning that permanent Daylight Saving Time would delay winter sunrise past 9 a.m. in some areas, echoing almost exactly the sunrise-timing objections that have paralysed the EU’s own state-by-state model.
A debate that splits the same way on both sides of the Atlantic
The substantive disagreement inside Congress mirrors Europe’s in its particulars as well as its structure. Proponents, including Democratic Representative Frank Pallone, argue the twice-yearly change is scientifically indefensible and cite reduced seasonal depression, more recreational activity and lower evening crime as reasons to lock in more evening light.
Sleep scientists on both continents tend to favour the opposite conclusion, arguing that permanent standard time aligns better with human circadian rhythms, a position Representative Mary Gay Scanlon raised in committee this week in explicit preference over the version the House ultimately passed. That same standard-time-versus-summer-time split, backed by competing scientific and economic arguments, is precisely what has kept EU member states from converging on a single answer for six years running.
The House bill’s path forward is not guaranteed. The Senate passed its own daylight saving measure by unanimous consent in 2022, but it never received a floor vote in the House. A bipartisan group of senators tried again in 2025, seeking unanimous consent, only to be blocked by Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas. Whether this year’s House vote breaks that pattern or joins it depends on a chamber that has already shown, twice, that broad public support for ending the clock change does not translate automatically into a final law.
An ocean apart, watching the same clock
Some in Europe’s own debate are watching Washington for exactly this reason. Jørgen Bak, chairman of the Danish Association Against Daylight Saving Time, has said a US decision to abolish the clock change could meaningfully shift European willingness to act on its own stalled 2019 reform finally. Whether that logic runs the other way, whether America’s own state-level opt-out structure ends up freezing implementation the same way Brussels’ member-state model has, is a test the Sunshine Protection Act has not yet had to pass.
