History Offers Cautionary Tale for Pols Pushing Permanent Daylight Saving Time

Politicians rushing to enact year-round Daylight Saving Time as an easy win ahead of the midterms might be wise to review what happened during America’s last experiment with permanent DST in January 1974.Approved as an energy-saving measure during an OPEC oil embargo that year, the measure was wildly popular with the American public at first. In a poll conducted weeks before the measure went into effect by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, 79 percent of Americans supported the idea.“I think it’s a good idea,” one citizen said at the time to the Dayton Daily News, as quoted in 2025 by author and blogger Tara Ross. “We need the daylight in the evening, not in the morning.” The Dayton paper quoted another person who was excited by the prospect of winter golf, while retailers looked forward to increased shopping during the evenings. And then as now, Americans welcomed relief from the frustration of moving their clocks forward or back twice a year.But the initial enthusiasm quickly dissipated as Americans awoke to the reality of pitch-dark winter mornings, with the sun rising as late as 9 a.m. in the northernmost states.Anxieties were exacerbated when, within weeks after the switch, eight children in South Florida were killed in separate early‑morning traffic accidents while walking to school. That prompted the then Florida governor, Reubin Askew, to call for an immediate return to standard time, saying, “Any amount of disruption in commerce would be small indeed when compared to the life of even a single child.”By February, less than two months after the start of what had begun as a two-year experiment, public support had collapsed. A Harris Poll conducted that month found that only 42 percent of respondents approved of the change while 57 percent opposed it.Support for permanent DST picked up somewhat that summer, according to a Smithsonian Magazine account. But as the following winter approached, Congress voted to repeal the measure and President Ford signed its death knell in October of that year.“The prospect of another long, dark — and potentially deadly — winter led lawmakers to end the planned two-year experiment early,” the Smithsonian Magazine recounted in a 2022 article. “As a Senate committee report stated, the ‘majority of the public’ had expressed ‘distaste’ for DST in the wintertime.”Compounding the seeming failure of the experiment, the magazine added, “was the fact that the change, according to the Department of Transportation, saved little energy and may have actually caused an uptick in gasoline consumption.” This week’s overwhelming 308-117 House vote to reintroduce permanent DST was not the first time Congress has revisited the idea in the 52 years since the original measure’s reversal.The Sunshine Protection Act, passed unanimously by the Senate in 2022, would have made DST permanent, but the bill stalled in the House and never became law. Several attempts were made to resuscitate the idea in the 1970s and ‘80s but never made it out of committee. In 2005, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act adding three weeks of DST in the spring and one week in the fall.But the failure of the 1974 experiment does not necessarily mean that permanent DST cannot succeed in the future. While American states are currently prohibited from enacting permanent DST, there has been no indication of dissatisfaction since the policy was introduced in 2020 in Canada’s Yukon Territory, where winter days can be as short as four or five hours.Two Canadian provinces, British Columbia and Alberta, have enacted permanent DST this year but have yet to experience their first winter under the policy.

History Offers Cautionary Tale for Pols Pushing Permanent Daylight Saving Time

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