Next up on Donald Trump’s lengthy Executive Office to-do list: Stop the clock.
“The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post Friday. “Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.”
His promise would make Standard Time, which we are currently in and which people overwhelmingly hate due to the increased darkness, permanent.
Proponents for Daylight Saving Time argue that the country uses less energy by extending the long summer sun an hour later into the evening. That was the reason behind Congress’s opt-in to Daylight Saving Time during World War I and World War II, according to Seize the Daylight author David Prerau.
That rationale hasn’t exactly held up—a 2008 study by the Department of Energy found that the clock switch saves a miniscule amount on the country’s annual energy usage—approximately 0.03 percent—while another study that same year out of the University of California-Santa Barbara suggested that Daylight Saving Time could actually cost the country more than not switching the clocks at all. Still, the majority of Americans want to make it permanent.
Trump’s sudden rejection of Daylight Saving Time is a near-total reversal of where he stood on the issue in 2019.
“Making Daylight Saving Time permanent is O.K. with me!” Trump wrote at the time.
But you don’t have to search far to figure out why Trump might have changed his mind. Tech billionaire Elon Musk, who has spent a considerable amount of time at Trump’s side in recent months, has been a vocal opponent of the time change. Earlier this month, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the other co-chair of Trump’s not-yet-real, nongovernmental commission—the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE)—voiced their support for abolishing Daylight Savings Time.
“Looks like the people want to abolish the annoying time changes!” Musk responded to an X poll indicating that the site’s users were no longer in favor of the back-and-forth.
“It’s inefficient & easy to change,” Ramaswamy responded.
Of course, any concrete change to the country’s official clock would have to pass through Congress—though the increasingly MAGA complicit Republican Party would be in for a rude awakening if they approved the “permanent” jump. America last tried this experiment in 1974, when officials discovered that the only thing less popular than permanent Daylight Saving Time was ending it, with support for the permanent switch falling from 79 percent to just 42 percent within three months, The New York Times reported that year.