'Inconvenient': Trump wants to kill Daylight Saving Time

13 December 2024

President-elect Donald Trump, expanding his efforts to entirely change how the United States operates, on Friday declared he wants to eliminate daylight saving time, and make standard time permanent — a move which just one-third of Americans prefer. Some forget America has tried to eliminate changing the clocks before.

“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,” Trump decreed.

But according to a 2022 CBS News/YouGov poll, nearly half of the nation, 46%, prefer permanent daylight saving time. 33% prefer permanent standard time, and just one in five Americans (21%) like switching clocks back and forth. A separate YouGov poll that same year found a majority of Americans, 59%, want permanent daylight saving time.

“Extending daylight saving time to the whole year is favored over standard time by nearly all demographic and political groups. It’s rare these days to find partisan agreement on many issues, but Republicans, Democrats and independents all have a preference for permanent daylight saving time over permanent standard time,” CBS News reported in 2022, noting that “the Senate unanimously passed a bill making daylight saving time permanent,” but the House of Representatives has not voted on it.

That Senate bill was filed by U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), Trump’s Secretary of State nominee. Trump’s eldest son supports permanent daylight saving time.

ABC News adds that in 2019, Trump declared he preferred permanent daylight saving time, but “appears to be changing course now.”

“This comes as his DOGE directors, Tesla and X CEO Elon Musk and Republican businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, have advocated for the time change to be eliminated.

“‘Looks like the people want to abolish the annoying time change,’ Musk posted in response to a poll on X calling for DST to be abolished,” ABC notes.

But Musk did not specify if he thought daylight saving time or standard time was better for the nation.

In the 1970s, legislation signed into law by President Richard Nixon eliminated standard time, and made daylight saving time permanent, as Business Insider reported two years ago. The bill initially had a whopping 80% approval. After several months of extreme darkness in the mornings, which led to more accidents including involving children going to school, public approval of the law dropped to 43%.

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