No More Daylight Saving Time? Musk, Ramaswamy Muse On Ending Clock Changes.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy say they’re hunting for ways to make American government more efficient. One possible target: the semiannual changing of the clock that so many Americans dislike.

“Looks like the people want to abolish the annoying time changes!” Musk wrote last week on his social platform, X, linking to another user’s online poll that found most respondents wanted to end daylight saving time. The practice of shifting clocks forward one hour in March and back one hour in November is intended to maximize Americans’ exposure to sunlight during working hours but has long been derided for causing groggy mornings, missed appointments and even some public health problems.

“It’s inefficient & easy to change,” Ramaswamy wrote in a reply to Musk.

It was not immediately clear whether the two men, whom President-elect Donald Trump has tapped to run a new effort dubbed the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) were seriously floating a new policy priority or just spitballing on social media. It was also unclear how a Trump White House would seek to end clock changes, given that Congress – not the executive branch – has controlled the nation’s time shifts, and lawmakers’ recent legislation has stalled.

Ramaswamy did not respond to a request for comment. X and Tesla, which Musk also owns, did not immediately respond to requests sent to them asking for comment from Musk.

In a follow-up post, Musk told Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) that he did indeed want to end the time changes.

The simmering fight over how Americans set their clocks, and when they must do it, has drawn unusual coalitions in Washington based more on geography than on politics. Republicans and Democrats, mostly from the coasts, have called for year-round daylight saving time, saying that permanently advancing the clocks one hour and never “falling back” would allow more people to enjoy sunshine and avoid the frustrations involved with resetting clocks.

“Switching the clocks just doesn’t make sense for a country on the move,” Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Massachusetts) said in a statement to The Washington Post. “But we need permanent daylight saving time – more hours of daylight in the evening means more hours to get things done.”

Politicians in the center of the country have often balked at the idea, warning that a year-round “spring forward” would mean winter sunrises that could creep past 9 a.m. in cities such as Indianapolis and Detroit.

Meanwhile, public health groups have said that permanent standard time would be more natural for our circadian rhythms, citing research that the clock changes increase the risk of heart attacks, stroke and other health problems.

“There is a significant stress on the body, and changes that occur, when we are not aligned to the right internal clock,” Lourdes DelRosso, a sleep medicine physician at the University of California at San Francisco-Fresno and co-chair of this year’s World Sleep Day awareness event, said in an interview earlier this year.

A March 2023 YouGov poll found that 62 percent of Americans want to end the practice of changing the clocks, but there was little consensus over what to do next. Half of respondents said they wanted year-round daylight saving time, just under one-third wanted permanent standard time and the remainder said they were unsure or had no opinion.

For more than a century, Americans have shifted their clocks forward every spring and back every fall, a tradition that was eventually enshrined in federal law.

Voters’ complaints about those clock changes are not new. Lawmakers in the early 1970s moved to permanently adopt daylight saving time, but the decision almost immediately backfired with nationwide complaints, such as children waiting in the dark for school buses to arrive. Congress rolled back the change after 10 months.

That defeat has not stopped Markey and other lawmakers who have steadily pushed to lengthen the number of days that Americans spend under daylight saving time, extending that period in 1985, and again in 2005. Most Americans now live with daylight saving time for 238 days a year – nearly eight months. (Two states, Hawaii and most of Arizona, have opted out of the semiannual time changes and remain on permanent standard time, which states are allowed to do.)

But states cannot adopt permanent daylight saving time unless Congress passes a bill that allows them to do so. There is a growing political movement attempting to do just that; the Senate in 2022 passed a bill that died in the House. Twenty states have also approved measures that would allow them to adopt year-round daylight saving time if Congress passed a bill making it permanent nationwide, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Other countries have ended their own clock changes, including Mexico, which moved to abolish daylight saving time in 2022.

Musk was born and spent his childhood in South Africa – which does not follow daylight saving time – and has previously mocked America’s semiannual time changes.

“Finally, an explanation for daylight savings that makes sense …” the billionaire entrepreneur wrote on social media in 2017, linking to a video by the Onion, a satirical news site, that lampooned the practice.

President Joe Biden’s views on time changes are unclear. The White House has not responded to questions in the past two years about whether Biden supported efforts in Congress to adopt year-round daylight saving time, which may have stifled lawmakers’ attempts to attract support for their bill. But the next president appears more receptive.

“Making Daylight Saving Time permanent is O.K. with me!” Trump wrote on social media in March 2019, the Monday morning after the “spring forward” took effect that year.

The Transportation Department oversees the implementation of daylight saving time, and agency officials have said DOT does not have the authority to change it without an act of Congress.

It is not clear whether Musk and Ramaswamy, who have argued that recent Supreme Court decisions would allow the White House to make regulatory changes without going through Congress, see a path to doing so with daylight saving time. Their commission is supposed to make its recommendations to the president by July 4, 2026 – the date they’ve targeted to wind down their panel.

Musk and Ramaswamy may have other allies in Trump’s emerging administration. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida), Trump’s pick to serve as secretary of state, has spent years calling to end clock changes and make daylight saving time year-round.

“My Sunshine Protection Act would end this stupid practice of changing our clocks back and forth,” Rubio said in a statement in March, referencing his legislation. His office did not respond to a request for comment about whether Rubio had spoken with Musk and Ramaswamy about ending the semiannual clock changes.

“Can we just stop changing our clocks twice a year?” Jim O’Neill, Trump’s pick to be deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, wrote on X in 2022. “The one industry that doesn’t need disruption is daylight.”

(c) Washington Post