Clocks will skip ahead an hour at 2 a.m. Sunday for daylight saving time in most of the U.S., creating a 23-hour day that throws off sleep schedules, plunges early-morning dog walks into darkness and inspires millions of complaints.
Even though polls show most people dislike the system that has most Americans changing clocks twice a year, the political moves necessary to change the system haven’t succeeded because opinions on the issue and its potential impacts are sharply divided.
Want to make daylight saving time permanent? That would mean the sun rises around 9 a.m. in Detroit for a while during the winter. Prefer staying on standard time year round? That would mean the sun would be up at 4:11 a.m. in Seattle in June.
“There’s no law we can pass to move the sun to our will,” said Jay Pea, the president of Save Standard Time, an organization devoted to switching to standard time for good.
Here’s a look at the debate.
Imposing a clock on a rotating planet causes a lot of headaches
Genie Lauren spends her winters in New York City keeping an eye on the sunrise and sunset “white-knuckling it” until the sun is up late enough for her to feel like doing anything outside her apartment after work — even going to the movies.
“The majority of the year we’re in daylight savings time,” said the 41-year-old health care worker. “What are we doing this for?”
The U.S. has tinkered with the clock intermittently since railroads standardized the time zones in 1883. So has a lot of the world. About 140 countries have had daylight saving time at some point; about half that many do now.
About 1 in 10 U.S. adults favor the current system of changing the clocks, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted last year. About half oppose that system, and some 4 in 10 didn’t have an opinion. If they had to choose, most Americans say they would prefer to make daylight saving time permanent, rather than standard time.
A dilemma for policymakers
Since 2018, 19 states — including much of the South and a block of states in the northwestern U.S. — have adopted laws calling for a move to permanent daylight saving time.
There’s a catch: Congress would need to pass a law to allow states to go to full-time daylight saving time, something that was in place nationwide during World War II and for an unpopular, brief stint in 1974.
The U.S. Senate passed a bill in 2022 to move to permanent daylight saving time. A similar House bill hasn’t been brought to a vote.
U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican from Alabama who introduces such a bill every term, said the airline industry, which doesn’t want the scheduling complexity a change would bring, has been a factor in persuading lawmakers not to take it up.
U.S. Rep. Greg Steube, a Florida Republican, is proposing another approach.
“Why not just split the baby?” he asked. “Move it 30 minutes so it would be halfway between the two.”
Steube thinks his bill could get bipartisan support. The change would make the U.S. out of sync with most of the world — though India has taken a similar approach and in Nepal, the time is 15 minutes ahead of India.
Sleep experts prefer more daylight in the morning
Karin Johnson, the vice president of the advocacy group Save Standard Time and a professor of neurology at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, said permanent standard time — with the sun straight overhead close to noon — would help students, drivers and practically everyone else function better year-round.
“Morning light is what’s really critical for setting our circadian rhythms each day,” she said.
