Be gentle with yourselves, dear readers. You lost an hour of sleep due to the American system of daylight savings time (DST), by which we move our clocks forward one hour in spring to give us more daylight in the afternoon. “Arise!” says your clock. Your body says, “Too early!”
Should we keep this system of moving our clocks backward and forward? President Trump signaled in December 2024 his desire to get rid of DST, observing that it was both “inconvenient” and “very costly to our nation.” More recently, he has hedged on pushing for a change because Americans are divided on it: “And if something’s a 50-50 issue, it’s hard to get excited about it.”
Though Americans are not unanimous on the issue, there is evidence that a majority support keeping one standard of time. If we want to truly Make America Healthy Again, year-round Standard Time is one tool to do so.
DST is not an ancient custom hallowed by constant usage. Until 1883 in America, most local communities set their own clocks. The adoption of standardized time zones was required by the system of railroads—everybody needed to be on the same clocks so that the trains not only ran on time but did not crash.
DST was introduced in 1918 alongside our now familiar four time zones (five were created at the time, including Alaska) as part of the Standard Time Act. (The official name is “daylight saving time,” but even my spellcheck tends to prefer “savings.”)
The point of DST was to stretch working hours and conserve energy during World War I. The next year DST was repealed, but many communities and even states kept it. The standardization of the clocks was not complete.
National DST was mandated again during World War II for the same reasons as it was during World War I. It was made optional afterward for the same reasons: it was controversial. My father told me that when he lived with his grandmother in Indiana during World War II, she refused to operate by DST. Standard time, she would say, was “God’s time.”
Up until Congress’s 1966 Uniform Time Act, some states and parts of states used DST while others didn’t. And the states didn’t all switch their clocks on the same schedule. If standard time is God’s time, God alone knew what time it was in any given part of the country. The Uniform Time Act was intended to clear up some problems with who was in which time zone; it also made clear when states should spring forward or fall back so that travelers and businesses would be able to plan better.
Yet, even after 1966, allowances were made for different states. In 1973, Congress passed the Emergency Daylight Saving Time Conservation Act, which introduced a trial period of year-round DST from January 1974 to April 1975, but the experiment only lasted till October of the first year because many people expressed concern about the darkness in the morning.
Since that time, there has still not been pure consistency. Hawaii and Arizona opted out of DST altogether (though not the Navajo Nation in Arizona), as did Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, the Mariana Islands, Guam, and American Samoa. The Indiana of my youth was divided until 2006. Some counties (mine included) still adhered to my great grandma’s doctrine, some did not. In 2006, the whole state adopted the program.
Indiana’s adoption followed a period in which there was high support for DST. When Gallup asked Americans about DST in 1990, 74% supported it. In 1999, 73% did. But that support has declined. A new Gallup poll (the first to ask since 1999) shows Americans support abandoning DST by a 54-40 margin (6% are uncertain about the issue).
But should we simply adopt DST as the universal standard? President Trump’s ambivalence about action because of the division among Americans was in part because he thought most people want permanent DST. “I assumed people would like to have more light later,” he said. Not surprising given that the native New Yorker president has been living in Florida, where then-Governor Rick Scott signed the Sunshine Protection Act in 2018. That bill would make DST permanent, but it requires Congressional approval. It never got it.
The reason the Sunshine Protection Act has not been able to pass is because of reasons that President Trump has discovered, namely that “some people want to have more light earlier because they don’t want to take their kids to school in the dark.” According to the NCSL state DST legislative tracker, since Florida’s 2018 bill, 18 states have “enacted legislation” for year-round DST, meaning that once we spring forward we would stay sprung. But many others do not.
A federal Sunshine Protection Act bill has been introduced in both houses of Congress since 2018; a 2022 version passed the Senate but never got out of the House. There is a reason for that. The Gallup poll did not just ask whether people liked changing clocks. It also asked a separate question as to whether people would prefer permanent standard time, permanent DST, or the clock switching. 48% preferred permanent standard time; 24% permanent DST; and 19% like what we have now.
That permanent standard time might win is not surprising. Americans are not alone in having experimented with year-round DST and rejecting it. In an article in favor of permanent standard time, neurologist Joanna Fong-Isariyawongse writes that since 1968, Russia, the U.K., and Portugal all tried year-round DST at some point. Russia and the U.K. dropped it after three years, while Portugal hung on for four. “All of these countries found that the switch caused widespread public dissatisfaction, health concerns, more morning car accidents and disrupted work schedules. No country is currently on year-round daylight saving time.”
The original arguments for DST included the hypothesis that it would result in energy savings. But economist Laura Grant examined studies in both the U.S. and abroad. What she found was that there was no decrease in energy usage under DST. In fact, in a study of Indiana after adopting statewide DST, the result was an increase in energy usage.
Grant linked to plenty of studies showing the increase in accidents, workplace injuries, and even disruptions to heart health. As Fong-Isariyawongse observed, however, even permanent DST seems to show many of these results.
Given these findings, it is no surprise that the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) position statement lays out a case for permanent standard time based on “chronic harmful effects of DST on human physiology, health, performance and safety, and on economics,” for which they have a variety of data.
AASM argues that the main reason for these downsides is that standard time aligns with our internal body clocks while DST does not. We are meant to get up in the sunlight and go to bed in the dark! AASM presents evidence that even after months of DST, the human body clock does not adjust. The end result is a loss of sleep for almost everybody—with all the problems that this entails.
There is a fair argument for allowing some states with particular situations to use DST part of the time. For the rest of us, however, the way forward to Make America Healthy Again is the way that aligns the clocks on our walls and in our phones with the clocks inside our bodies.
Americans declared independence under the aegis of “the Law of Nature and Nature’s God.” In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was referring to the moral law within our nature. But part of that moral law is to seek the commonweal of the people, taking account of our bodily natures.
Those bodies have internal rhythms that make us want to get up with the sun, see it above us at noon, and go to bed as it dwindles in the west. Permanent standard time achieves that. DST does not. And there is plenty of evidence that it has hurt our health.
To Make America Healthy Again, let’s move back to God’s time.
David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.
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