DOGE Con­sid­ers End­ing Day­light Sav­ing Time

Posted in Election 2024  •  Published by

Time is mon­ey, and the Depart­ment of Gov­ern­ment Effi­cien­cy might have a low hang­ing fruit in its quest to save both.

DOGE, an out­side advi­so­ry group led by Trump allies Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, has expressed inter­est in abol­ish­ing Day­light Sav­ing time in the Unit­ed States as part of their broad­er cru­sade to cut gov­ern­ment waste. Day­light Sav­ing time (DST) is observed between the 2nd Sun­day of March to the 1st Sun­day of Novem­ber – every year Amer­i­cans move their clocks for­ward, then back, in an effort to max­i­mize the num­ber of wak­ing day­light hours.

Advo­cates of DST have argued that it boosts eco­nom­ic effi­cien­cy by decreas­ing the need for arti­fi­cial light­ing and encour­ag­ing peo­ple to spend more time out­doors – how­ev­er, a meta-analy­sis of sev­er­al dozen stud­ies con­duct­ed by Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty in 2021 found that DST only reduced ener­gy con­sump­tion by ~0.34%. A 2008 study by the Nation­al Bureau of Eco­nom­ic Research found that DST might actu­al­ly increase ener­gy con­sump­tion by as much as 1%.

Mean­while, the arbi­trary shift for­ward or back­ward by an hour com­pli­cates inter­na­tion­al trav­el and can cause sched­ul­ing errors for trav­el­ers or busi­ness­es who aren’t used to observ­ing the change.

The eco­nom­ic costs of dis­rupt­ing American’s sleep sched­ules by mov­ing the clock for­ward an hour could also be quite high – one study by Chmu­ra Eco­nom­ics and Ana­lyt­ics linked the DST time change to a con­sis­tent increase in heart attacks, work­place injuries, and a drop in work­place pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. The study esti­mat­ed these side effects cost the Amer­i­can econ­o­my $434 mil­lion dol­lars every year.

Recent­ly, Musk and Ramaswamy have both sug­gest­ed that they would sup­port get­ting rid of DST.

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“Looks like the peo­ple want to abol­ish the annoy­ing time changes!” Musk said on X, the plat­form for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter, in response to a user who request­ed the end of DST as a birth­day present.

“It’s inef­fi­cient & easy to change.” Ramaswamy respond­ed.

DST is a rel­a­tive­ly recent phe­nom­e­non in the Unit­ed States – while the U.S. briefly observed it dur­ing both World Wars in an effort to save pow­er, mov­ing the clocks for­ward and back­ward by an hour wasn’t stan­dard­ized until 1966. Hawaii and most parts of Ari­zona already do not observe DST, and there have been mount­ing efforts to stop the annu­al time change in recent years.

Sen. Mar­co Rubio (R‑FL), anoth­er Trump ally whom the Pres­i­dent-Elect nom­i­nat­ed to become Sec­re­tary of State, spon­sored a bill to stop the reg­u­lar time changes (“The Sun­shine Pro­tec­tion Act”) in 2018, 2021, and 2023. More than a dozen sen­a­tors from both par­ties co-spon­sored the most recent edi­tion of the bill.

“This rit­u­al of chang­ing time twice a year is stu­pid,” Rubio said. “Lock­ing the clock has over­whelm­ing bipar­ti­san and pop­u­lar sup­port.”