When Congress resumes, they will have a great many weighty issues to discuss. I invite them, and you as their constituents, to take a break from the weight of the world and grapple instead with a seemingly simple problem—Daylight Saving Time. Sometime between bedtime and wake-up time Saturday night and Sunday morning we are instructed to turn our clocks back an hour. One hour of daylight will be subtracted from the early evening and revert to morning. People will be late for church. On Monday, school children may have a bit of sunlight when they meet the school bus. Golfers will find their evening game curtailed. Supposedly DST saves energy, but the evidence is slim.
Fortunately, most of our clocks will be reset automatically, but I still have three clocks to reset in my kitchen, my bedroom and my car. I do so under protest, because I don’t like confusing my body by messing with my biorhythms. Apparently that attitude is shared by a substantial majority of our fellow citizens. According to a NORC poll in 2025, 47% of the population oppose changing the clocks, while only 12% are in favor. The other 40% don’t really care. A YouGov survey from 2026 found that 67% of us do not like the twice a year change, while only 19% thought it was a good idea. Ending the clock reset sounds like a slam dunk, a real people pleaser.
But then comes the hitch. The two polls registered 56% and 51% in favor of keeping our clocks on Daylight Saving Time year-round instead of mid-March to November, while 42% and 43% preferred Eastern Standard Time. Too close for comfort. That’s just a little more than half who will be happy and a little less than half will be unhappy. School children will have a better shot at surviving to get on the bus, while golfers will resent no evening relaxation after a hard day’s work. The New England states, where it gets dark by 4:30 pm in the winter, are considering a switch to Atlantic time. Northern states in general are more heavily impacted by the choice of DST or EST than Southern states, because their daylight is shorter, so maybe they should have more say in the decision
What’s the answer? It calls for some creative thinking. Perhaps school should start later, making school bus pickups safer. Kids get a little more time to wake up before their first class. Or maybe employers, public and private, need to be more flexible about working hours.
There are no simple questions. If Congress can’t find a way out of the DST/EST challenge, how are they supposed to address the war in Iran, tariffs, the budget deficit, inflation, immigration, and the pending threat to the future of Social Security?
Aren’t you glad you didn’t run for Congress?
