Why our clocks are (still) falling back today
It's a system that frustrates many of us — but may be the system we have to live with.
I was watching an NBA game the other night, where the announcers started bantering about the need to set their clocks back on Sunday.
“I thought we were done with that,” said one.1
As someone who has chronicled the fight over daylight saving time, it reminded me of a common reaction: confusion.
People aren’t sure what “daylight saving time” is, or how it works. (Daylight saving time is the process of “springing forward” an hour in March, and “falling back” an hour in November.)
They aren’t clear on why it happens. (It’s a century-old compromise to try to maximize Americans’ daylight hours during workdays.)
And they don’t know the time-rules, largely because there’s been a flurry of political activity the past few years in an effort to change them.
Here’s how we got here. Back in 2022, a bill that would allow states to adopt permanent daylight saving time surprisingly passed the Senate — shocking even some senators, who didn’t realize a vote was happening.
It also awoke a lobbying fight, with sleep-medicine doctors particularly opposed to year-round daylight saving time and warning it would be unhealthy. Those experts pushed instead for year-round standard time, essentially staying on the clocks that we have in the winter months, arguing that system would be more natural for our circadian rhythms.
The bill died in the House, but combatants on both sides saw the episode — and the flurry of national attention — as a new dawn and vowed to redouble their efforts.
Then a year ago, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the incoming leaders of Trump’s DOGE team, floated the idea of ending clock changes as a way to boost Americans’ efficiency. (There’s a lot of polling suggesting that this idea is popular, but difficult to accomplish in practice; more on that in a moment.)
President-elect Donald Trump soon posted that the Republican party would try to “eliminate Daylight Saving Time,” calling it “inconvenient” and expensive.
It wasn’t entirely clear that Trump knew what it meant to end “Daylight Saving Time” — he had previously endorsed the bill to let states make it year-round. Some advisers suggested that Trump, like Musk and Ramaswamy, just wanted to end the unpopular clock changes. Both sides saw an opportunity to sway the incoming administration.
But by this spring, Trump had punted the problem to Congress, saying that it was a “50-50 issue” and too hard to reach consensus. The president also said he was personally in favor of year-round daylight saving time.
And then last week, there was a dramatic showdown on the Senate floor, with lawmakers attempting to again pass their bill for year-round daylight saving time. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) — a frequent Trump ally — blocked the bill, vowing to always oppose the idea.
“Sometimes we have to live with an uneasy compromise between competing priorities and interests,” Cotton said. “That’s doubly true when considering how the movement of the stars and the planets affect the lives of 350 million souls spread across our vast continental nation.”
So: there’s been a lot of movement on what was once a sleepy issue.2 It’s no surprise that Americans are confused.
It’s also a rare fight that doesn’t break down along party lines, but along latitudes and longitudes. Generally, coastal and southern lawmakers are pushing year-round daylight saving time, while lawmakers in the center of the country say it would unfairly punish their states and force people in Indianapolis and Detroit to wait until 9 a.m. to see the sun rise on some days.
(Here’s an interactive Washington Post map on how the various options would affect you.)
Meanwhile, half of all Democrats and Republicans oppose the current system of changing our clocks twice per year, per AP/NORC polling released last week. But the same polls find little agreement on how to proceed. Sometimes people change their responses based on slight tweaks on the questions. And what’s good for Massachusetts may not be good for Michigan.
And the frustration peaks twice a year, around the clock changes. If your house is like mine today, you’re having a very long Sunday with kids who woke up at their usual body-clock time, even if the physical clock has shifted an hour back.
Here’s my latest story — no paywall — on the political fight to change our “daylight” system, and the inertia keeping it in place.
Americans are tired of clock changes. But a Trump bid to end them fails again.
And set your alarms to revisit this issue in March, when groggy and frustrated Americans are asking again why their clocks just changed.
I am slightly paraphrasing.
I’m also leaving out the effort to end daylight saving time in other countries, the failed attempt in the 1970s to try year-round daylight saving time in the United States …I could go on.