Trump says he’s working ‘very hard’ to make daylight saving time permanent

President Trump on Thursday praised a House committee for advancing a bill to make daylight saving time permanent, a rare moment of bipartisan accord between the Republican and Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat who has long supported the idea.

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“Big Vote today (48-1!) in the [House] Energy and Commerce Committee on a Bill including The Sunshine Protection Act, which will be making Daylight Saving Time Permanent!” Trump posted onTruth Social Thursday night.

“This is so important in that Hundreds of Millions of Dollars are spent every year by people, Cities, and States, being forced to change their Clocks,” the post continued.

Trump said the “House will be attaching The Sunshine Protection Act to ‘The Highway Bill.’ … I am going to work very hard to see The Sunshine Protection Act signed into Law. It’s time that people can stop worrying about the ‘Clock,’ not to mention all of the work and money that is spent on this ridiculous, twice yearly production.”

In a statement posted on X, the committee said it was “proud to have advanced legislation to the House including the Sunshine Protection Act and making Daylight Saving Time permanent.”

The committee said the “bill will generate hundreds of millions of dollars for our economy and put an end to disruptive time changes that needlessly disrupt Americans’ schedule twice a year.”

While Trump in his celebratory post credited the GOP for “a very nice WIN” should the measure ultimately reach his desk, Markey has long advocated for the proposal, too.

In March 2022, as the Massachusetts senator was cosponsoring a Senate version of the effort to lock in daylight saving time year-round, Markey posted a playlist on X he had curated in 2021 to generated support for the measure.

It featured such hits as The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun,” Sheryl Crow’s “Soak Up The Sun,” and — you guessed it — Scooter Lee’s “Walking On Sunshine.”

He also posted a separate video plugging the measure at the time.

A request for comment on Trump’s post was sent to Markey’s office on Friday.

Markey is currently in a primary battle with Congressman Seth Moulton for the Senate seat.

Not everyone is on board with the daylight saving measure. Some public health experts voiced reservations in 2022 as Markey pushed a Senate version of the bill.

Ending the back-and-forth time switch between standard and daylight saving time would put an end to adverse health effects that come from the change, but doctors and sleep experts said at the time that Congress was going in the wrong direction.

The better choice, many said, would be to make standard time — the zone we inhabit from November to March — the one true time.

“In their zeal to prevent the annual switch, the Senate has unfortunately chosen the wrong time to stabilize onto,” Dr. Charles Czeisler, chief of the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders at Brigham and Women’s Hospital said at the time. Sticking with daylight saving time all year would mean many people would be starting their days in darkness, he warned.

“What the Senate passed [in 2022] would require all Americans to start their work and school an hour earlier than they usually do, and that’s particularly difficult to do in the winter, when the sun is rising later.”

Abandoning standard time is about more than enduring groggy, dark winter mornings. Shifting the day forward an hour for good would disrupt humans’ natural circadian rhythms, and that’s not good for us, experts say.

“Our internal clock is not connected to the clock on the wall. It’s connected to the sun clock, because that’s how it’s been for millennia,” Dr. M. Adeel Rishi, a pulmonology, sleep medicine, and critical care specialist in Indianapolis and vice chair of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine Public Safety Committee, said in 2022.

“Regardless of what happens on the clock on the wall, it does not change the relationship between our internal clocks and the sun clock.”

Material from prior Globe stories was used in this report. This story will be updated when more information is released.

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