Another View: DOGE’s best idea yet is permanent daylight saving time

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the two billionaires tasked by President-elect Donald Trump to find ways to make government more efficient, have hit upon one good idea: ending the obnoxious and inconvenient twice-a-year clock change between daylight saving time (in the summer) and so-called standard time (in the winter).

“Looks like the people want to abolish the annoying time changes’’ Musk declared on X in response to a poll from a user that found that 82% of the 38,000 respondents supported abolishing the semiannual ritual.

“It’s inefficient & easy to change,’’ Ramaswamy replied, evidently unaware that if it was easy it would have already happened.

These men could do a lot of shady stuff as heads of the proposed Department of Government Efficiency. But making the summer clock setting permanent just might be one of the brightest ideas they’ll have.

I can see the memes now: “Less Government. More Sunshine.”

Studies show longer daytimes result in fewer traffic fatalities. Later daylight curbs electricity usage and gives people more time to shop and exercise.

No more after-school activities in the gloaming. No more dinners in the black of night. And no more confusing schedule shifts that mess up body rhythms twice a year.

Preserving that extra hour of afternoon daylight as the gloom of winter arrives could even give Musk and Ramaswamy that attention-getting legacy they seem to crave.

The duo was recently on Capitol Hill to meet with legislators for what House Speaker Mike Johnson described as a “brainstorming session” on how to shrink government. It is not known if this good idea came up, but it should have.

As with much of what Musk and Ramaswamy are proposing, they have made unrealistic claims about what they can do before they have all the facts. And resetting the nation’s clocks is not as easy as punching in some new numbers on your digital clock. It requires an act of Congress.

The good news is that there’s already draft legislation, sponsored most recently by Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio. It’s called the “Sunshine Protection Act” and it would make daylight saving time permanent. It even has a catchy slogan: “Lock the clock.” The Senate passed a similar bill in 2022 with bipartisan support. It died in the House.

The idea is already remarkably popular. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 20 states have enacted legislation or passed resolutions to provide for year-round daylight saving time. A March 2023 YouGov poll found that 62% of Americans want a year-round national clock, and more than half — 56% — said they preferred going to a full year of DST. Only 26% prefer standard time.

Not everyone sees the clock change the same way, of course. In 2021, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine issued a position paper calling for the end to daylight saving time. Their argument: Shifting sunlight later in the day contradicts the body’s circadian rhythms.

The U.S. tried permanent DST once before, at the height of the Arab oil embargo in 1974. The trial run lasted only 10 months. The primary complaint was that parents were unhappy about sending children to school in the dark.

But here is a solution to that, too, which is that school districts should reconsider their start times — especially for teens whose nocturnal clocks really don’t sync well with such early schedules.

The idea is good PR for Musk and Ramaswamy, from whom we’re going to hear a lot in the next few months in their roles as co-heads of “DOGE.” (The acronym was conjured up to generate attention for Musk’s preferred cryptocurrency, dogecoin.) It won’t be an official federal agency, so their financial involvements with the federal government aren’t expected to be subject to the normal disclosure rules. They’ll be able to shield from the public any potential conflicts that emerge from their recommendations.

That’s a dangerous precedent, of course, and they should vow to be completely transparent. But if they call on Congress to make daylight saving year-round, they won’t be lying when they say they support “government in the sunshine.”

Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.