On March 12, 48 states will make the one-hour adjustment to Daylight Savings Time (DST).
Marco Rubio, a U.S. senator from Florida, proposed and reintroduced the Sunshine Protection Act of 2023 on March 2.
According to the one-pager of the bill, the “Sunshine Protection Act would eliminate the changing of clocks to standard time for those four months. In sum, if enacted, we would not ‘fall back’ in November and would enjoy a full year of DST, instead of only eight months.”
In order for the bill to become a law, it would have to pass the Senate, House and, finally, be signed into law by President Joe Biden.
The bill is similar to several others that have been proposed in the past couple of years, including the Sunshine Protection Act of 2021 which passed the Senate but didn’t make it through the House.
DST was adopted in the U.S. in 1918 as, “An Act To save daylight and to provide standard time, for the United States.”
The law received several updates, one during World War II and another in the 60s.
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 extended DST to be standard eight months out of the year; the law adjusted the observance to begin at 2 a.m. on the second Sunday of March and end the first Sunday of November.
The U.S. Department of Transportation is responsible for overseeing the country’s uniform observance of DST.