May 31, 2026

Daylight Savings Time: Should Congress Act?

By: Art da Rosa, PE, MPA, CFM | Rigby, ID

The House Energy and Commerce Committee just voted 48-1 to advance the Sunshine Protection Act — a bill that would make Daylight Saving Time permanent in the United States. Before we applaud and move on, we should ask a simple question: Does the government have any business telling us what time it is in the first place? The first duty of any government official is to stay within the boundaries the people have set. This issue is an example of what happens when they don’t.

IT STARTED WITH THE SUN

For most of human history, noon meant one thing: the sun at its highest point in the sky. Not a number on a clock decreed by Congress — the actual sun, overhead, visible to every person equally. The ancient Egyptians, the Romans, and every civilization that came before us anchored their days to that observable reality. Sunrise. Solar noon. Sunset. Midnight. These were not conventions. They were facts written into the created order of the natural world.

“Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven… for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and for years.” — Genesis 1:14

Days are the first and most fundamental unit of time — preceding seasons and years in Scripture itself. And they were given to us by the lights in the sky, not by legislative vote.

THE CONSTITUTIONAL PROBLEM

The federal government justifies its authority over timekeeping through the Commerce Clause. But the Founders never envisioned Washington setting the nation’s clocks. The Tenth Amendment reserves powers not delegated to the federal government to the states and the people. Notably, states can opt out of Daylight-Saving Time — Arizona and Hawaii do —, but they cannot adopt permanent DST without an act of Congress. The federal government has made itself the gatekeeper of what time it is. That should give us pause.

WHEN THE GOVERNMENT OVERREACHES, IT TENDS TO MAKE THINGS WORSE

There is a pattern worth naming here. When the federal government ventures beyond its proper constitutional lane, it rarely improves on the natural order it displaces. It substitutes the judgment of legislators and lobbyists for the accumulated wisdom of centuries — and the results are typically a tangle of unintended consequences that take generations to undo.

Daylight Saving Time is a perfect case study. It was introduced during World War I as a wartime energy measure, then repealed, then reinstated during World War II, then left to a chaotic patchwork of local decisions until the federal government stepped in with the Uniform Time Act of 1966 to impose uniformity. Each intervention was sold as a fix for the problems created by the previous one. Sound familiar?

The original justification — that shifting the clocks would save energy — turned out to be largely false. Decades of studies failed to confirm meaningful savings; some found that energy use actually increased, as people drove more in the extra evening light and ran air conditioning longer into the warm evenings. The government had confidently solved a problem that either didn’t exist or that it made worse. And yet the policy not only survived — it is now being made permanent.

The government didn’t gain us an extra hour of sunlight. It just moved the label — and called it progress.

This is the signature move of government overreach: identify a real frustration (clock-switching is genuinely disruptive), propose a solution that exceeds proper authority, watch the solution fail or backfire, then double down rather than retreat. Permanent DST is the doubling down.

THE MORAL PROBLEM

This may be the most overlooked argument. Permanent DST means that in most of the country, the sun will reach its peak in the sky at 1:00 p.m. by the clock. We are not gaining daylight. We are relabeling it. The sun does not move because Congress votes. Calling 1:00 p.m. “noon” is, at its core, an institutional untruth — a false standard dressed up as policy.

“A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is His delight.” — Proverbs 11:1

The principle of honest measurement runs deep — in Scripture, in natural law, in simple integrity. When a government shifts the clock and calls it progress, it is asking 330 million people to agree that the sun is wrong.

WHAT SHOULD ACTUALLY HAPPEN

The one thing proponents get right is that changing the clocks twice a year should end. The disruption is real and harmful — with documented spikes in heart attacks, strokes, and car crashes in the days following each clock change. But the answer is permanent standard time — the time that aligns with the sun, with our biology, and with the honest definition of noon. Most sleep scientists and chronobiologists agree. Morning light regulates our circadian rhythms. Children walking to school in darkness under permanent DST is not a feature. It is a consequence.

The federal government did not create the day. It cannot improve on it. The most honest thing Congress could do is admit the experiment failed, restore standard time permanently, and let the sun do what it has always done — tell us exactly what time it is.

Government works best when it stays in its lane. This is a good place to start.

Art da Rosa, PE, MPA, CFM
Rigby, ID