United States President-elect Donald Trump has announced that he will endeavour to end daylight saving time, the practice of moving clocks forward during the summer to take advantage of longer daylight hours.
In a social media post on Friday, Trump said that the conservative Republican Party would “use its best efforts” to end the practice, which he criticised as inefficient.
“The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t!” he wrote. “Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.”
Trump is set to be sworn into office on January 20, and his incoming administration includes several members who vocally oppose daylight saving time.
Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, for instance, has made multiple pushes in Congress to end the clock-switching practice, including one as recently as this year. In 2022, his bill, the Sunshine Protection Act, passed the Senate before ultimately failing to gain traction in the House of Representatives.
Rubio, who has been tapped to serve as Trump’s secretary of state, has called daylight saving time a “stupid practice”.
Meanwhile, two close Trump allies — entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy — openly weighed nixing daylight saving time on the social media platform X earlier this year.
Responding to a user’s complaint about daylight saving in November, Musk wrote, “Looks like the people want to abolish the annoying time changes!” Ramaswamy quickly chimed in: “It’s inefficient [and] easy to change.”
Under Trump, the two businessmen have been tasked with leading a yet-to-be-established, nongovernmental body called the Department of Government Efficiency, which will provide advice on how to streamline federal regulations, spending and bureaucracy.
But previous efforts to eliminate daylight saving time all have fallen flat.
The practice was first instituted in the US in 1918, as a means of preserving energy during World War I. The law mandating daylight saving was later repealed in 1919, shortly after the war ended.
But in 1942, after World War II began, the practice remerged “to promote the national security and defense”.
Ever since, the merits of daylight saving have been consistently debated in US politics, on both sides of the aisle.
Some argue the practice of switching the clocks back and forth negatively affects human sleep patterns, resulting in increased risks for health problems like heart attacks. But a 2024 study from the Mayo Clinic says the threat to heart health is “likely minimal”.
Nowadays, most Americans turn their clocks back one hour in early November and forward one hour in mid-March.
What’s known as “daylight time” therefore runs from March to November, during the warmer, summer months in the US. “Standard time”, by contrast, runs during the winter, from November to March.
Only two states opt out of this practice: Arizona and Hawaii.
Still, many Americans support no longer having to switch time frames twice per year. More than 60 percent of people say they would like to see the changing of the clocks eliminated, according to a 2023 survey conducted by the research firm YouGov.
About 50 percent of people support making daylight time — and the later sunrises and sunsets that accompany it — permanent. About 32 percent, by contrast, support making standard time, which comes with earlier sunrises and sunsets, permanent.
Most countries have no such practice, and some medical associations have said that making standard time permanent would align more closely with the natural cycle of the sun and people’s sleeping needs.