The fight over daylight saving, a debate straight out of 'Veep'
Big Sleep vs. the Sun King, and the polls can't decide on a winner
One joke in D.C. politics is that people believe they’re coming here to star in “The West Wing” — to pursue ambitious policies and write soaring speeches, just like in the classic NBC show. But everyone soon discovers they’re actually characters in “Veep,” the profane HBO comedy about politicians bumbling their way through Washington.1
I hate to spoil “Veep” for anyone who hasn’t seen it. But …
… there’s a subplot about a minor congressman who declares war on “daylight saving time-loving bureaucrats,” vowing to end the clock changes that mess up our sleep schedules twice per year.
“Daylight saving — not plural — time has never saved us from anything,” the fictional Rep. Jonah Ryan says in an eerily realistic speech on the House floor.
If you’ve seen “Veep,” you know its characters were obsessed with petty, unwinnable fights. So the show’s writers couldn’t have picked a better pretend plotline: daylight saving battles have divided Congress for decades, as lawmakers fumed over efforts to shift the clock an hour one way or the other.
And a year ago, when a real-life congressional subcommittee held the latest hearing on daylight saving time, I got one of those “Veep” clips into The Washington Post — back when I thought it was the one and only story I’d do on the issue.
But a week later, everything in the real world changed: the Senate passed a bill for year-round daylight saving time, in a surprise unanimous vote. Jonah Ryan’s fictional wish for no more clock changes seemed suddenly … half-plausible? Our Congress was halfway there, at least.
As The Post’s overnight expert on congressional time policies, I jumped into covering the emerging debate and haven’t stopped since.
Frankly, the more I learn about daylight saving time — the history of time zones dating back to the railroads, the politics of the current moment and the health implications — the more fascinated I get.
And with people feeling groggy coast-to-coast today, reeling from Sunday’s time change, I wanted to share what I’ve learned.
If you prefer audio, you can hear some of this in my interview last year with “Post Reports,” our flagship podcast at The Washington Post. I also spoke with Preet Bharara for his own Vox podcast that went up today.
To the takeaways!
1. People really do hate the clock change.
Surveys consistently show that most Americans want to stop “springing forward” and “falling back.” More than 60 percent of respondents to a YouGov poll last week said they wanted to eliminate the clock changes, basically in line with this Monmouth poll from last year and other recent findings.
Among the complaints: bad sleep for adults, disrupted schedules for children and pets, and exhaustion that lingers for a few days and causes all kinds of frustrations or even real problems. (More on those problems in a moment.)
The issue also seems to bring a lot of us together. Jonah Ryan’s fictional war on clock changes was played for laughs, but check out the comments on that YouTube link; viewers usually hated the “Veep” character, but they agreed with him here!
2. But they don’t know what they want instead.
If asked, many Americans say they prefer year-round daylight saving time, where the clocks would be permanently shifted forward an hour. But it’s not a slam dunk; for every 5 people who like that idea, another 3 think we should just stay on permanent standard time and never spring forward at all, according to YouGov’s poll.
The debate is further muddled because some people don’t understand the terms.2 For instance, YouGov's poll found that 26 percent of respondents thought that the United States already follows permanent standard time. (Hopefully those folks realized their mistake this week, when daylight saving time kicked in.)
People also may lean toward the idea of more “daylight” because it sounds appealing, without realizing the trade-offs — namely, darker mornings in the winter. This Business Insider piece by Shayanne Gal makes the case that while Americans say they prefer year-round daylight time, the policies they actually want are more in line with year-round standard time.
I’ve spoken to lawmakers who argue that, given the confusion, Americans could be persuaded one way or another. Which brings us to…
3. The Senate vote last year changed everything.
On March 9, 2022, the House held a hearing on daylight saving time, listening to experts make the case for getting rid of the clock changes and replacing our current system with something else.
And then on March 15, the Senate passed its bill for year-round daylight saving time, using a maneuver that skipped committee review and floor debate. The vote shocked almost everybody — the House lawmakers who had just held their own hearing, White House officials who weren’t sure what President Biden preferred and even some senators who said they wished they’d debated the idea first.
It also woke up advocacy groups, including the association for sleep-medicine doctors, which has warned for years that permanent daylight saving time is unhealthy. After the Senate vote, these lobbyists started spending more money to fight daylight saving time and began their own campaign for competing legislation.
Depending on who you ask, the Senate’s surprise vote was a miscalculation or a masterstroke.
I spoke to House staff this month who are still frustrated with the Senate, arguing that there was real potential last year for a daylight-saving debate — to talk to experts, build consensus on a fix, and steadily work legislation through Congress — that got drowned out by the giant reaction to the Senate vote.
But I also talked with Senate staff who counter that their vote was necessary to catalyze more debate, and that many more Americans got educated on daylight saving time as a result of all the attention last year.3 And it's true that the once-sleepy issue of daylight saving reform is now pretty buzzy.
4. The health and wellbeing issues are real and knotty.
Advocates for both standard and daylight time agree on one thing: the clock changes are bad. There’s greater risk of heart attack and stroke in the subsequent days after a time shift; groggy drivers get into more car accidents; children need to be retrained on their sleep schedules, and so on.
But the advocates are split on what to do next.
One case for permanent daylight saving time is that we’d get more sunlight in the winter months, at a time when people are grappling with seasonal affective disorder and could benefit from brighter afternoons and evenings. That’s especially true in cities like Boston and Seattle, where the sun currently goes down by 4:15 p.m. at some points in December. And it’s an argument also advanced by retail and sporting groups, eager for more business on sunnier winter days.
Meanwhile, the sleep medicine doctors have built a counter-argument: if we just followed our natural biology, we’d stick with standard time year-round. (They also note that when Congress enacted permanent daylight saving time 50 years ago, Americans immediately rejected it and the law was repealed within a year.)
The American Medical Association last year endorsed permanent standard time, with one AMA official saying that the case was clear and that “issues other than patient health are driving this debate.”
There’s also a third option: Just sticking with the status quo. Changing the clocks is the compromise that makes the most sense, journalist Josh Barro argues, given that Americans disproportionately gain or lose daylight depending where they live.
Could we do the clock changes better? David Prerau, the author of “Seize the Daylight,” a great history of daylight saving time, told me that a national advertising campaign could help ensure people are more prepared each spring and fall.
I’m open-minded here, but my pre-Washington Post stance is on record: Keep the clock change but move it to Friday night, and adjust to the new time during a three-day weekend.
5. This is the most light-hearted issue I’ve covered in Congress.
Both Democratic and Republican aides freely admit: daylight saving time gets lawmakers to loosen up.
Some Hill aides even joked that daylight saving time is being opposed by “Big Sleep” — the sleep-medicine experts — who like “Big Tech” and “Big Pharma,” are ramping up their lobbying, letters and other tactics that tend to stymie congressional legislation.4
Meanwhile, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has spent decades trying to expand daylight saving time — one reason he was nicknamed “The Sun King” in 1985, after one of his bills lengthened U.S. daylight saving time by a month. (A second Markey bill, in 2005, lengthened daylight saving time by three more weeks.)
The Massachusetts Democrat seems nearly as committed to jokes about his legislation; I interviewed Markey last week, and he tried to work a sun pun into conversation every few minutes.5
6. It’s possible that real changes will result.
There’s clear momentum around time policy in Congress.
Four years ago, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) introduced his bill for permanent daylight saving time, the Sunshine Protection Act, but couldn’t find anyone to co-sponsor it. By last year, he had 18 co-sponsors, including Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who both chair key Senate panels, as well as Markey and others.
The Sunshine Protection Act remains far from a majority in the Senate, and a companion bill in the House faces an uphill battle too. And the polls of what Americans actually want here are unclear.
Still, Markey has a sunny outlook about the prospects of the bill.
“It happens once a generation — 1985, 2005,” Markey told me last week, referencing his past legislation. “So the time is right.”
I don’t know the odds of the current bill. But I’m pretty confident: there’s gonna be more “Veep” jokes if Congress actually changes daylight saving time.
“Our long national nightmare and daymare is over,” the fictional Jonah Ryan wrote in a tweet last year, after the Senate vote to stop the clock changes. (Like so much in “Veep,” it was a clever line, delivered by an overconfident character who took his victory lap too soon.)
You can read more in our story below. No paywall!
Permanent daylight saving time: The clock is ticking in Congress
Tommy Vietor, a former Obama aide, said as much on a 2017 episode of his podcast, Pod Save America.
If helpful, here’s my tip to remember the difference:
By “springing forward,” we “save the daylight” for later in the day.
We “fall back” to the natural “standard.”
Staff for Sen. Marco Rubio and other senators who voted for permanent daylight saving time last year also say it’s wrong to call it a “surprise” vote, because they had previously notified other offices of their plan to hold the vote. Regardless, some other lawmakers had no idea a vote on daylight saving time was coming and were visibly flabbergasted by the unanimous decision.
To be clear, the lobbying spending by “Big Sleep” is dwarfed by the huge sums of those other industries.
Here are two examples: “I'm going to be working with Senator Rubio to bring my colleagues on board so that the legislation can have its moment in the sun,” Markey vowed, seconds into our interview. And as we wrapped up 20 minutes or so later, the senator tried to end on a positive note: “brighter days are ahead.”