Permanent Daylight Saving Time Would Be the Wrong Fix

On Friday, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to pressure Senate Republicans into passing the Sunshine Protection Act, a bill that would make permanent daylight saving time the national standard and end the twice-yearly clock change. In the post, reported by USA Today, Trump singled out Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, saying Cotton was holding up the legislation "for reasons unknown." The sales pitch is familiar and seductive: no more lost sleep in March, and daylight lingering into winter evenings. The contrarian case is that America has already run this experiment, and it ended with Congress repealing the policy within a single year.

In January 1974, with the country in an energy crisis, President Richard Nixon signed a law putting the entire nation on permanent daylight saving time. The stated goal was to save fuel by cutting evening demand for lighting and heating. Public approval started high. Then the winter mornings arrived, and children across the country began walking to school and waiting for buses in complete darkness. In Florida, where the fallout was worst, early-morning accidents involving students rattled the state, and newspapers filled with accounts from angry parents. Within months, the politics of the experiment had collapsed.

The polling tells the rest of the story. Surveys tracking the experiment showed support for permanent daylight saving time falling from roughly four in five Americans to fewer than half over the course of a single winter. Congress reversed course and returned the nation to standard time for that winter, and President Gerald Ford signed the rollback into law, according to National Geographic. The pattern is worth remembering as the Senate takes up the same idea half a century later: enthusiasm for brighter evenings runs high in the abstract and evaporates on the first morning a kid boards a bus before sunrise.

The second problem with the current push is that the science points the other way. Most Americans agree the twice-a-year clock switching should end; polling from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found three-quarters of adults would rather not bounce between the two systems. But sleep researchers have long argued that permanent standard time, not permanent daylight saving time, is the healthier permanent arrangement, because morning light is the anchor for the body's internal clock. Ending the switch would be popular; replacing it with permanent daylight saving time is not what the research supports. Critics of the Sunshine Protection Act echo the point in plainer terms: lock the clock forward and much of the country gets pitch-black school runs and work commutes through December and January.

The dark mornings nobody campaigns on

Senators who have kept the bill stalled keep returning to the same objection. Opponents say winter sunrises would shift so late that children would head to school before dawn across much of the northern half of the country, a concern reported by USA Today in its coverage of the debate. It is the exact scenario that sank the experiment of the nineteen-seventies. Arizona and Hawaii already live on permanent standard time, and their residents seem perfectly unbothered by winter evenings arriving on schedule. Nineteen states have passed laws to adopt permanent daylight saving time once Congress allows it, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, which shows how much political energy sits behind the idea. Voters seem to love the idea of permanent daylight saving time right up until the first pitch-black school run.

The stronger unpopular opinion: standard time wins

Here is the view that would actually make dinner conversation awkward: the healthy version of "lock the clock" is locking it to standard time, not daylight saving. The latest Gallup data, cited by National Geographic, finds more Americans favor permanent standard time than the daylight saving alternative, which means the polling majority may not want what the bill is selling. Matthew Kotchen, a Yale professor who studies the costs and benefits of daylight saving, argues in a National Geographic history of the policy that the current split system is "roughly the middle way" and that daylight saving can do more harm than good on energy use. If the goal is a clock that matches human biology rather than one that flatters the evening commute, standard time is the answer the debate keeps ignoring.