Permanent Daylight Saving Time? You won’t like it, North Carolina

We often repeat mistakes until we learn their lessons. So it seems with daylight saving time.

President Donald Trump, lately of sun-drenched south Florida, is exhorting the U.S. Senate to make daylight saving time permanent.

“The Senate must vote on the NO MORE CHANGING THE CLOCKS ACT as soon as possible,” Trump wrote recently on Truth Social, referring to the Sunshine Protection Act of 2025.

The bill would make daylight saving time the permanent national standard, ending the unpopular practice of changing clocks every March and November. The U.S. House of Representatives approved the measure 308–117 in July. It awaits consideration in the U.S. Senate, which returns to work soon after a long summer break.

Making the bill law would be an even bigger mistake now than the last time we tried it, in 1974 – a failed experiment that Congress repealed within months after a public outcry and a spike in pre-dawn traffic accidents, including the deaths of children waiting for school buses.

The push to adopt yearlong DST recurs like a spring allergy. It’s promoted as a better alternative to episodic DST or to permanent standard time – which was the global norm until nations began adopting DST during World War I to save energy. Politicians in sunny Florida, where the days are longer than in every state except Hawaii, tend to promote permanent DST most fervently.

“More sun later in the day is better (including for fighting crime!),” Trump wrote in his post. “But, even more importantly, NO MORE RIDICULOUSLY CHANGING CLOCKS AND WATCHES TWICE YEARLY, with all of the disruption and chaos it causes. FINALLY, GET IT DONE!!!”

It’s not every day that Trump comes out against chaos, but he has a point. People hate changing their clocks from standard time to daylight saving time in the spring and then back again in the fall. And for good reason: the move interrupts people’s sleep patterns, work schedules, and school rhythms. Heart attacks and accident injuries rise.

In North Carolina, recent state legislation to adopt either year-round daylight saving time or constant standard time has gone nowhere.

A nationwide Gallup poll last year found that almost three-quarters of Americans would rather leave their clocks alone. Twice as many favored full-time standard time (including me) as those who preferred year-round daylight saving time (like many of my friends).

Despite its disruptions in spring and fall, daylight saving time makes sense in summer, when the northern hemisphere enjoys a surplus of sunlight. Without it, dawn in northern cities such as Boston, Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee would arrive between 4 and 4:15 a.m.

Permanent DST’s proponents are vocal, and not just in Florida and the White House. But they tend to ignore the costly trade-offs elsewhere.

Some science: Nights are long in winter because our hemisphere tilts away from the sun then – the opposite of summer. Stealing an hour from the morning to add it to the evening does not make the days any longer or the nights any shorter, just as cutting off one end of a rope and gluing it to the other doesn’t lengthen it.

No daily time is gained or “saved” with DST; it merely shifts. The only way to get longer days year-round is to move closer to the equator, where the Earth’s tilt is less pronounced.

The inescapable problem with year-round DST is that in northern states and in cities at the western edges of their time zones, fall and winter sunrises would occur unacceptably late. One miserable winter of tardy sunrises, and public pressure likely would force Congress to reverse course yet again, as in 1974. America has 135 million more people now, most of whom oppose permanent DST.

Sunrises sometimes occur quite late already, thanks to the main flaw of daylight saving time as practiced today: it lasts far too long, from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November. That’s 238 days, or 34 weeks – almost two-thirds of the year.

That DST span includes fairly short daylight days in spring and fall, which is why changing the clocks then feels like such a big shock. If the changes occurred on dates with more daylight, the shift would seem more gradual, and therefore more natural.

What, then, to do? In a nation spanning the middle latitudes of a wobbling planet, the least bothersome solution of all would be to keep daylight saving time but shorten its duration considerably.

The optimal DST calendar, I argue, would start the first Sunday in May (one week before Mother’s Day) and end the second Sunday in September (the weekend after Labor Day). It would last 133 days, or 19 weeks – more than one-third of the year.

Streamlining DST would provide the extended evening daylight many people love during the summer, including on important holidays, without causing such a shock to the system.

Failing that, the next-best option is not to impose permanent DST on the entire nation. It’s to let states choose it on their own, starting with fussy Florida. Other states that try year-round DST might find, like Congress, that they were wrong to give it a second chance.

Or we could all move to Ecuador.

Eisley is a North Carolina communication consultant. Reach him at [email protected].

This story was originally published September 10, 2026 at 5:00 AM with the headline “Permanent Daylight Saving Time? You won’t like it, North Carolina | Opinion.”