The government efficiency czars Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy seem to be mulling over a monumental change: eliminating daylight savings time.
If anyone was worried that Musk and Ramaswamy would move unilaterally as unelected bureaucrats making sweeping decisions on behalf of the electorate, you can calm your fears: Apparently they’re seeding ideas from polls on X.
“Looks like the people want to abolish the annoying time changes!” Musk posted on X last week, in response to a poll by X user James Stephenson that found nearly 82 percent of fewer than 38,000 X users would “abolish” the system of changing the clocks forward in the spring and backward in the fall.
Isn’t that what democracy is all about? Acquiescing to the requests of “X users” who are most likely bots? Having a guy who runs a social media service make decisions for the country based on the popular opinion artificially generated by his own website? That kind of thing just makes you feel so patriotic.
“It’s inefficient & easy to change,” Ramaswamy replied in a separate post.
It’s not clear that the two have seriously considered ending the practice of changing the clocks, but Musk reiterated his intention to “end the semi-annual time changes” in a follow-up post on X.
The U.S. already tried to permanently change to daylight savings time in 1974—a briefly popular decision to manage fuel consumption that ended in disaster as reports rolled in of children being killed by cars as they waited to be picked up by school buses in the dark.
While nearly 80 percent of Americans support changing the current system, according to a 2022 CBS/YouGov poll, they were less decisive about which way to move the clock. Forty-six percent wanted to shift an hour of daylight to the evening, while 33 percent preferred sticking to standard time.
It’s unclear whether Musk would advocate moving to daylight savings time or standard time, but either way would require massive infrastructure projects, which the penny-pinching DOGE-ists aren’t likely to fund. Unless, maybe, an X poll told them to.
