October 17, 2025
You know how twice a year we all moan and complain about changing our clocks? Well, buckle up, because the story behind daylight saving time is way more interesting and complicated than you might think.
A lot of people blame Ben Franklin for this whole mess, but that’s not exactly fair. Yeah, he did write a satirical essay in 1784 suggesting Parisians could save candles by waking up earlier. But he was totally spoofing. He wasn’t actually proposing messing around with clocks. The guy was basically trolling the French before trolling was even a thing.
The real push for daylight saving time came way later, during World War I. Germany (for a century the country that kept on giving, right?) was the first country to actually implement it in 1916, and their reasoning was straightforward: save fuel for the war effort. When you’re fighting a massive war, every bit of coal and electricity counts. The idea was that if you shifted the clocks forward, people would use less artificial lighting in the evenings. Britain and the rest of Europe quickly followed suit, and the United States joined the party in 1918.
But here’s where it gets screwed up. After the war ended, people hated it. Farmers especially couldn’t stand it…contrary to popular belief, they were actually some of the biggest opponents of daylight-saving time. The whole “helping farmers” thing is basically a myth. Their schedules were tied to the sun anyway, and the time change just made it harder to get their products to market when city folks expected them.
So, in the U.S., the federal law got repealed after just seven months. But then things went bozo chaotic. Cities and states could decide for themselves whether to observe daylight saving time, and it became this total free-for-all. Imagine trying to do business or travel when neighboring towns might be on different times! There was a famous story about a 35-mile bus ride between Ohio and West Virginia that went through seven different time changes. Seven!
World War II brought it back again with the same justification…save energy for the war. But after the war ended, we fell right back into chaos. This continued until 1966, when the federal government finally said, “Enough is enough!” and passed the Uniform Time Act. This didn’t force states to adopt daylight saving time, but it did say that if they were going to do it, everyone in the state had to do it the same way.
Now, you’d think that would settle things. No, it did not. We’ve been tinkering with it ever since. In the 1970s during the energy crisis, we tried year-round daylight-saving time for a bit. That experiment didn’t last long, partly because kids were going to school in the dark and parents were freaking out about safety.
The most recent big change came in 2005, when the Energy Policy Act extended daylight-saving time by about a month. Now it runs from early March to early November, which means we’re on daylight saving time for more of the year than we’re on standard time. Kind of wild when you think about it.
Today, there’s a huge debate about whether we should just pick a time and stick with it. Some states like Arizona and Hawaii don’t observe it at all. Several states have passed laws saying they want to stay on daylight saving time permanently, but they can’t do it without federal approval. It’s become this weird political football.
The whole thing is kind of absurd when you step back and look at it. We’ve been arguing about this for over a century now, and we still haven’t figured it out.
But hope springs eternal:
The Sunshine Protection Act has been reintroduced in 2025 in both the House (H.R. 139) and Senate (S.29) and would make daylight saving time permanent year-round. Senator Martin Heinrich reintroduced the bipartisan legislation in January 2025, with the bill led by Senator Rick Scott Heinrich of New Mexico.
Representative Vern Buchanan introduced the House version, and the bill has support from multiple members of Congress. President Trump has also consistently said that he wants to end the twice-annual clock change.
Good to go, right?
Wrong. (Make buzzer sound…)
Here’s the catch: the bills were introduced in January 2025 and sent to committee, but since then there has been no further action to advance the legislation in either chamber. This is actually a familiar pattern…the Sunshine Protection Act has been introduced multiple times over the years, and while the Senate passed it by unanimous consent in 2022, it never came up for a vote in the House. So, the 117th Congress ended without it becoming law.
Interestingly, state legislatures have considered at least 450 bills and resolutions in recent years to establish year-round daylight-saving time, but they’re all waiting for federal approval since states can’t make this change on their own.
Texas recently passed a bill in May 2025 to make daylight saving time permanent, joining at least 18 other states with similar legislation, but none can take effect without federal action.
At some point, your eyeballs begin to ache and you’re just kind of done with the whole thing. I know I am. But at least we now have all we need to know on the subject and can close the book on it. I think if they pass the legislation, we’ll all be too exhausted to care…note that I am not encouraging you to write to your representative because I think they’d dismiss your letter as weird. Someone will think it’s an alien conspiracy.
Maybe they’d turn it over to DOJ for examination?
Are we done yet?
Thoughts, questions, or reflections? I’d love to hear them. You can reach me anytime at anthony@workingprofit.com
