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Donald Trump says he is going to permanently put an end to end daylight saving time (DST) once he returns to the office of President. He claims he will be doing so because the practice is “very costly” to America.
The idea of abolishing daylight saving time is nothing new. At least twice a year it draws loads of complaints from people who prefer it one way or another.
In 2022, the Senate even unanimously passed the Sunshine Protection Act, which was supposed to make DST permanent across the United States in 2023. That didn’t happen as it got stalled in the House of Representatives. There was also the small issue that several senators afterward stating they were unaware that they had voted for it.
One of the reasons the bill stalled in the House is because numerous health associations like the American Medical Association and American Academy of Sleep Medicine have stated that standard time should be made permanent, not daylight saving time. They believe standard time better syncs human biology with the sun’s rising and setting.
“Changing the clock twice a year is outdated and unnecessary,” Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida said at the time. He could have also been speaking about the electoral college, but that’s a fight for another day.
“The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t! Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation,” Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social.
This, of course, will have no bearing on people who live in Arizona and Hawaii as those two states never change their clocks. Smart.
Also, despite there being a long-held myth that farmers were the biggest proponents of DST, they have actually been one of the strongest lobbying groups against it.
In actuality, daylight saving time was first implemented in the United States in 1918 as a wartime measure during World War I. It only lasted seven months. It wasn’t until World War II that daylight saving time was put in place again. After that war, the government left it up to local jurisdictions to decide if they wanted to keep using it or not.
In 1966, the Uniform Time Act made switching to and from DST every year a permanent national policy. However, in 1974, America chose to stop changing the clocks twice a year, making daylight saving time permanent year-round. That only lasted a year though because people complained about kids going to school and adults having to go to work in the dark.