A Senate committee convened on Thursday to hear from various experts regarding the establishment of a year-round time standard. This discussion comes a few months after President Trump expressed his intention to eliminate daylight saving time.
“Time is inherently complicated, and our current system reflects that complexity, which is a product of human design,” stated Scott Yates, founder of the Stop the Clock movement advocating for the abolition of biannual time changes.
“The movement of the sun around the Earth isn’t intrinsically related to time,” Yates noted. “While we require this system, it currently has a flaw, namely daylight saving time and the clock adjustments involved. If we allow sufficient time, a couple of years, for individual states to navigate these complexities and make informed decisions, we can permanently eliminate this flaw. We’ve faced this issue since World War I, and now we have a chance to resolve it.”
The Senate Commerce Committee’s hearing announcement did not indicate a preference for daylight saving time or standard time, instead focusing on “various issues regarding whether the country should continue the practice of ‘springing forward’ and ‘falling back’ each year with time.”
Daylight saving time starts in March, when clocks are advanced by one hour, and concludes in October when they revert to standard time.
The biannual time changes are largely disliked by Americans, with 63% indicating they wish to abolish them entirely, contrasted with just 16% who do not, according to a poll by Economist/YouGov conducted in November 2021.
A 2020 commentary published in the journal JAMA Neurology highlighted potential links between the annual shift to daylight saving time and increased rates of strokes, heart attacks, and sleep deprivation among teenagers.
The Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act in 2022, aiming to make daylight saving time permanent; however, the legislation stalled in the House. The 2022 bill counted 17 co-sponsors from both parties and was led by then-Sen. Marco Rubio, who currently serves as Secretary of State in the Trump administration.
However, Mr. Trump may have complicated matters in December when he tweeted that “Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient and very costly to our Nation.” In the same post, he stated the “Republican Party will strive to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but firm following, but shouldn’t!”
Previously, Mr. Trump had advocated for making daylight saving time permanent—essentially retaining clocks one hour ahead, as observed in the spring. His comment in December called for the complete elimination of daylight saving time.
Alongside Yates, other witnesses at Thursday’s hearing included Jay Karen, CEO of the National Golf Course Owners Association; Karin Johnson, a practicing physician and neurology professor at UMass Chan School of Medicine Baystate, representing the American Academy of Sleep Medicine; and David Harkey, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
