WASHINGTON — President-Elect Donald Trump said Republicans are eyeing eliminating the bi-yearly time switch associated with daylight saving time across the U.S.
"The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t! Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient and very costly to our Nation," he said on social media.
It's not clear yet if the push would seek to actually end daylight saving time and go back to standard time year-round, or make daylight saving time the year-round standard as some Republicans and Democrats have pushed for in recent years with the Sunshine Protection Act.
Back in 2019, Tennessee passed a law that made daylight saving time the year-round standard time across the state to avoid messing with clocks and people's schedules twice a year. Other states passed similar measures, but those laws can't truly take effect until Congress changes the law across the country to allow states to observe daylight saving time year-round.
Currently, states are only allowed to enact measures that make Standard Time the year-round standard by opting out of observing daylight saving time. Arizona and Hawaii are the only states that currently do that. Most countries also do not observe DST.
There have been a few bills introduced in Congress to allow permanent daylight saving time, but all of them have stalled or failed. Until the national law is amended or tossed out, Tennesseans will have to continue "springing forward" and "falling back" each year.