CNN
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President-elect Donald Trump said Friday the Republican Party will seek to abolish daylight saving time, calling it “inconvenient” and “costly.”

“The Republican Party will do its best to abolish Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but powerful constituency, but it shouldn’t! Daylight saving time is inconvenient and very costly to our nation,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, whom the president-elect has tapped to lead a new government efficiency ministry, also recently said they support eliminating the biannual ritual of retreating and leaping forward, which would require congressional approval.

While other goals set by Musk and Ramaswamy for their ministry have been criticized as unwieldy or impossible, the biannual time change is a tradition that has lost its appeal to many voters, polls have shown.

And the change, if implemented, would have far-reaching implications and implications for how hundreds of millions of people start and end their days. It’s also an idea that some key members of Trump’s new administration and the Senate Republican caucus have loudly supported for years.

Most U.S. states move their clocks forward in March and back in November to balance the amount of sunlight people receive on a given day. Some advocates for change favor a permanent standard time and keeping the clocks in place year-round from November to March. This would result in parts of the country seeing earlier sunrises and sunsets than usual during those five months, leaving more light in the morning and less light in the evening. This approach is supported by medical groups and experts who say it best aligns with the body’s natural circadian rhythm.

Others advocate permanent summer time. The sun would rise and set later, so people would have less daylight in the morning and more daylight in the evening. This approach is often supported by retail, business and restaurant groups and organizations that want people to still have enough daylight after work or school to get out and about and participate in the economy, and by those who say that more daylight in the evening could reduce crime.

The reasons for supporting one side in this debate are as varied as each individual’s personal life experiences; Some parents may want their children to avoid waiting for the bus on a dark morning, while other parents may prefer to have some daylight while watching their children play sports after school.

Trump has previously expressed support for ending the time change, tweeting in 2019, “Making Daylight Saving Time permanent is OK with me!”

Previous attempts to do this have failed. Daylight saving time was first introduced during World War I to support the country’s industrial productivity during World War I – and not, as popular rumors often suggest, to give farmers more time in the day during harvest.

During most of World War II, daylight saving time was maintained permanently, including for industrial and energy policy reasons. During the gas crisis in the 1970s, the country tried again to make daylight saving time permanent, but public support fell after complaints about children being hit by cars while waiting for buses at night.

States are not required to change their clocks; Daylight saving time is not observed in Hawaii, most of Arizona, and some U.S. territories in the Pacific and Caribbean. In 2022, the US Senate passed a bill making daylight saving time permanent, but the House of Representatives did not vote on it. And last year, a bipartisan group of senators reintroduced legislation that would make the daylight saving time transition permanent. With the possible support of the president-elect, the country could now be preparing for further change – one way or another.

This story has been updated with additional reporting.

CNN’s Michael Williams contributed to this report.