President-elect Donald Trump on Friday said that Republicans will work together to end the semi-annual changing of the clocks between Daylight Savings Time and Standard Time.
“The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t! Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social page.
Eagle River House Rep. Jamie Allard is all about that. Last year, she filed a bill to end Daylight Savings Time, but could not get it heard in committee. She’s not giving up — this year, she’s preparing to pre-file a similar bill before the end of this month. Although Republicans are in the minority in Alaska’s Legislature, Allard says it’s worth a try.
Arizona and Hawaii already do not observe Daylight Savings Time, having taken advantage of loophole in the federal DST law. Also not switching their clocks back and forth every six months are the territories of American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Trump’s message was echoing the views of his Department of Government Efficiency allies Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who have called the time-switching process inefficient. Others have noted that there are health concerns with going back and forth twice a year — trouble sleeping, trouble waking, fatigue, and even high blood pressure.
Other leaders have attempted to end the practice, most recently Sen. Marco Rubio, who in March introduced the Sunshine Protection Act, which would make Daylight Saving Time permanent.
“We’re ‘springing forward’ but should have never ‘fallen back,'” Rubio said. “My Sunshine Protection Act would end this stupid practice of changing our clocks back and forth.” Like Allard, he served in a Democrat-dominated Senate and his bill was relegated to the back bench.
While some say that Standard Time should be the permanent time, others want Daylight Savings Time to be the norm. Daylight Savings Time allows for earlier sunrises in the winter, but the evening darkness happens earlier too.
In Alaska, where sunlight changes rapidly much of the year due to its northern location and the orbit of the earth around the sun, the clock change is just one more thing that busy Alaskans have to adjust to.
Great! After DST is killed off, they can kill off the 9/10ths of a cent-per-gallon gasoline ridiculousness.