Washington Lawmaker Voices Concerns Over Daylight Saving Time

A lawmaker from Washington state is using her son’s recent nosebleed as a platform to advocate for the end of the biannual clock change.

“My son just had his first nosebleed. Thank you, Daylight Saving Time, for this annual surprise,” Representative Marie Grusenkamp Perez, 37, shared on X and Facebook this past Sunday.

She added, “It’s not just kids getting overly tired and encountering accidents. Research indicates that the number of car and other accidents tends to increase in the days and weeks after clocks are adjusted.” While she referenced some contentious studies, these findings primarily pertain to the “spring-forward” change in March.

“No offense to Ben Franklin, but maybe it’s time to stop messing with our clocks twice a year,” she stated, mistakenly attributing the practice to the Founding Fathers.

“It’s gotta stop. It’s not just kids facing issues. People are genuinely getting hurt. This needs to come to an end,” she asserted in a video accompanying her post.

Daylight saving time was initially put into action in the U.S. through the Uniform Time Act of 1966, which mandated standard time across five time zones and set specific dates and times for clock changes.

In recent years, there have been efforts to make daylight saving time a permanent fixture, like the Sunshine Protection Act, which passed in the Senate back in 2022 but didn’t make it through the House.

Another iteration of the bill was introduced in January, garnishing support from 30 bipartisan co-sponsors, but it has remained stagnant in committee.

A brief experiment was conducted in 1974, where daylight saving time was enacted year-round under the Emergency Daylight Saving Time Energy Conservation Act, but it was repealed within a year due to public backlash.

Interestingly, former President Trump has also voiced his discontent with the clock changes, calling them “a very inconvenient and very costly event for our government” in an April post on Truth Social.

When asked how “daylight saving time” directly related to her son’s nosebleed, a spokesperson for Grusenkamp Perez replied, “Watching the video tells you everything. Parents with young children will recognize how daylight saving time disrupts their kids’ routines, leads to fatigue, and increases the risk of accidents.”