Hi @Joel_Eisenstat ,
if I understand correctly, the startdate field of your DB is a string that you fill with the content of the property date (this object is a Date) of a DatePicker (startdatePicker).
If you use a Date object in a method that expect a string as input, Creo tries to convert the Date to a string and in this case it results in a string like "2018-08-05 18:05:36 +0000".
With this string as an input the Date(rs.startdate,"yyyy-MM-dd","EST"); returns the current date because it fails to parse the "2018-08-05 18:05:36 +0000" string with the format "yyyy-MM-dd", and when it fails it returns the current date.
The format string must match exactly the input date string, so the string "2018-08-05 18:05:36 +0000" can be parsed by:

var d = Date(Label2.text, "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss '+0000'", "UTC");
startdatePicker.date = d;

Or, if you prefers to write to the DB a different format, you can get the string value from the picker with
DatePicker1.date.format("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm", "PST");
and then set this string from the DB to the picker with:

var d = Date(Label1.text, "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm", "PST"); 
startdatePicker.date = d;

@Joel_Eisenstat,
the DatePicker shows the time relative to its time zone, so I suppose that the DatePicker in your project is configured with a different time zone from the "EST" time zone you use to get the string representation of the DatePicker's date.