WASHINGTON ― We’ll be falling back to a time before daylight saving if President-elect Donald Trump gets his wish.
Trump said Friday he will work to end daylight saving time, putting his weight behind a long-debated effort to end semi-annual time changes.
The incoming president announced his push to make standard time year-round ‒ a move that would require action from Congress ‒ in a post on his social media site Truth Social.
“The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t!” Trump wrote. “Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.”
The U.S. is currently in standard time ‒ which moved the clocks back an hour on Nov. 3, resulting in early December sunsets that are often the subject of complaints. The nation is set to spring forward to daylight saving time again on March 9 of next year.
Although getting rid of daylight saving time would keep the strikingly early winter evenings, the move would mean no more time changes, which some call their biggest annoyance.
Tech entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are set to lead a Trump administration effort aimed at cutting government costs and improving efficiency, had signaled their support for scrapping daylight saving time. “Looks like the people want to abolish the annoying time changes,” Musk wrote in a post last month on X.
All but two states observe daylight saving time. (Under the Uniform Time Act of 1966, states can opt out of DST.) Yet even among those who want to scrap time changes, there’s a debate whether daylight saving time or standard time should be the one to go.
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In 2022, the Senate approved bipartisan legislation on unanimous consent to make daylight standard time permanent ‒ and keep the later sunsets ‒ but it stalled in the House. The bill was co-sponsored by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., a Trump ally and the incoming president’s nominee for secretary of state.
Health experts say time changes disrupt the body’s circadian rhythm and release hormones. But most oppose keeping daylight saving time permanent, citing evidence that springing forward an hour in March is harder on us than falling back in November.
“The medical and scientific communities are unified … that permanent standard time is better for human health,” said Erik Herzog, a professor of biology and neuroscience at Washington University in St. Louis and the former president of the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms.
Polling suggests Americans favor Trump’s idea of getting rid of daylight saving time.
About 43% want year-round standard time, 32% want permanent daylight saving time and 25% want to stick with the status quo, an October 2021 Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found. For now and for the near future at least, most Americans will keep going through the jarring time changes that come around twice a year.
The U.S. tried year-round daylight saving time once before. That came in 1974 under President Richard Nixon. Just a few months into the experiment, Congress acted to go back to standard time after complaints of children going to school in the dark on winter mornings.
Contributing: Jeanine Santucci
