Trump Says He’ll Move to End Daylight Saving Time

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump said Friday that Republicans will move to put an end to daylight saving time, though he admits it still has “a small but strong constituency.”

In a post on his social media site Truth Social Trump said the party would “use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time,” which he described as “inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.”

The concept of daylight saving time — setting clocks forward one hour in the spring and back an hour in the fall — has been around for centuries, but it wasn’t until 1918, that the idea was formally adopted in the United States as a wartime measure during World War I.

The goal as President Woodrow Wilson signed the biannual changing of the clocks into law in March 1918 was to add more daylight hours to conserve energy resources. A year-round form of daylight saving time, known as “war time,” was similarly implemented during the second world war.

For several years after that, however, local municipalities were free to choose when and if to observe daylight saving time. That ended in 1966, when Congress passed the Uniform Time Act, which standardized daylight saving time and the dates on which it would start and end.

But that wasn’t the end of tinkering with the concept.

In early 1974, President Richard Nixon signed a measure into law that again extended daylight saving time year-round in a bid to ease a gasoline crisis that saw millions of Americans waiting in line for hours to fill up at the pump.

At first, many consumers supported the change, but it quickly became evident that the strategy didn’t work — Americans actually started to consume more gasoline — and there were widespread complaints from parents about their children having to go to school in the dark.

In the face of those complaints, President Gerald Ford repealed the law in October 1974.

The most recent attempt at tinkering with the sunlight was a bipartisan bill called the Sunshine Protection Act that gained some traction on Capitol Hill three years ago.

Proponents of the measure wanted to make daylight saving time permanent. 

Ironically, the measure was sponsored in the Senate by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who Trump has nominated to be the next secretary of State.

Trump didn’t say who he thought comprised daylight saving time’s constituency, but one widely held belief about who it is turns out to be wrong.

Though generations of Americans grew up believing daylight saving time was implemented to benefit farmers and other members of the nation’s agricultural community, the reality is many members of the ag community openly detest it.

That’s because it tends to disrupt carefully planned schedules as it changes the amount of daylight available in the morning, and it can negatively impact livestock routines, especially in the dairy industry, where farmers need to milk cows at consistent times.

Trump did not say what his preferred sunlight schedule would be, but over the years many in the farming community have expressed a preference for staying on standard time year round.

Dan can be reached at [email protected] and @DanMcCue