The United States is one of the only countries in the world where people change their clocks twice per year.
Published On 13 Dec 2024
United States President-elect Donald Trump has announced that he will endeavour to end daylight saving time, the practice of moving clocks forward during the summer to take advantage of longer daylight hours.
In a social media post on Friday, Trump said that the conservative Republican Party would “use its best efforts” to end the practice, which he criticised as inefficient.
“The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t!” he wrote. “Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.”
Trump is set to be sworn into office on January 20, and his incoming administration includes several members who vocally oppose daylight saving time.
Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, for instance, has made multiple pushes in Congress to end the clock-switching practice, including one as recently as this year. In 2022, his bill, the Sunshine Protection Act, passed the Senate before ultimately failing to gain traction in the House of Representatives.
Rubio, who has been tapped to serve as Trump’s secretary of state, has called daylight saving time a “stupid practice”.
Meanwhile, two close Trump allies — entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy — openly weighed nixing daylight saving time on the social media platform X earlier this year.
Responding to a user’s complaint about daylight saving in November, Musk wrote, “Looks like the people want to abolish the annoying time changes!” Ramaswamy quickly chimed in: “It’s inefficient [and] easy to change.”
Under Trump, the two businessmen have been tasked with leading a yet-to-be-established, nongovernmental body called the Department of Government Efficiency, which will provide advice on how to streamline federal regulations, spending and bureaucracy.
But previous efforts to eliminate daylight saving time all have fallen flat.
The practice was first instituted in the US in 1918, as a means of preservin