On Sunday, March 9, most of the country will “spring forward,” setting our clocks ahead one hour for reasons most of us still don’t completely understand. But what we lose in sleep on Sunday morning, we’ll gain in the form of extra sunlight as we head towards the summer months.
But just like most issues, Daylight Saving Time has Americans divided. Some people love the idea of a little more light.
Others hate the idea of having their sleep schedule thrown off, even if it’s just for one day.
Even President Trump has found himself on both sides of the issue, writing on Truth Social in December 2024 that he was going to make getting rid of Daylight Saving Time a priority.
“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,”
But according to Axios, he changed his tune this week, leaving us to believe the issue has moved a little farther down on his to-do list.
“It’s a 50/50 issue, and if something is a 50/50 issue, it’s hard to get excited about it,” he said on March 6. “I assume people would like to have more light later, but some people want to have more light earlier because they don’t want to take their kids to school in the dark.”
But some members of Congress have their way, we may never have to do this foolishness again. The Sunshine Protection Act was the brainchild of former Republican Senator-now Secretary of State Marco Rubio who tried to put an end to all of the clock-changing confusion, arguing that more daylight hours would bring lower crime, fewer heart attacks and car accidents along with it.
“There’s some strong science behind it that is now showing and making people aware of the harm that clock-switching has,” he said in 2022.
The Senate passed the bill that year, but it was stalled in the House. This January, the bill was introduced into the House again, but they have yet to vote on it.
Before you laugh out loud at Rubio’s argument, there is some evidence supporting that the freaks do indeed come out at night. A Stanford study found that robbery rates went down an average of 51 percent during the hour of sunset after moving to daylight saving time in the spring. Cases of reported murder decreased by 48 percent and rape by 56 percent. But we all know that there’s a whole lot more to crime than that.
While most people think daylight saving was invented by farmers to have more time to work in the fields, the truth is most farmers were against the idea when it was first introduced in 1918. During World War I, daylight saving was intended to be a way to save energy if people spent more time outside. But these days, people just look forward to getting more time in the sun the spring and summer months until they get that extra hour of sleep one Sunday in November.