The Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing on Thursday on ending biannual time changes between standard and daylight saving time. Lawmakers who attended appeared unanimously supportive of eliminating the changes, with the primary debate revolving around how to implement the change.

President Donald Trump has voiced support for making daylight saving time permanent, feeding into what appears to be growing momentum on the issue, after the Senate approved legislation, the Sunshine Protection Act, to that effect in 2022. The same legislation is again pending in each chamber.

Orthodox Jewish groups have rallied against efforts to make daylight saving time permanent. Doing so, they argue, would force young children to travel to school in the dark and make it difficult or, in some cases, impossible for Orthodox Jews to attend post-sunrise morning prayers before work.

Orthodox Jewish groups lobbied aggressively to halt progress in the time change legislation in the House in 2022 after its surprise Senate passage.

Agudath Israel of America sent a memo to the Senate Commerce Committee ahead of the hearing presenting a series of arguments against making daylight saving time permanent, including that making children commute to school before sunrise has been demonstrated to be “a prescription for disaster.”

The memo specifically highlights a previous decision in the 1970s to make daylight saving time permanent, which was quickly repealed amid public outcry and findings that the change did not achieve the desired effects in energy savings and instead disrupted public life.

The memo notes that the change would particularly impact students attending Jewish schools, many of whom begin their school days at 7:30 a.m. and are not entitled to public busing.

“Whatever benefits that may accrue due to extended DST pales in comparison to the cost in safety of our children,” the Agudah memo reads.

It also cites concerns about morning prayer observance, calling the potential change “an extreme hardship” and saying “Jewish religious and professional life will be deeply upended.”

A.D. Motzen, Agudah’s national director of government affairs, told Jewish Insider that Congress has taken the Orthodox Jewish community’s views into account before during previous debates on extending Daylight Saving Time and said he’s hopeful lawmakers will do the same now.

He said that people living on the East Coast may not realize that in the Midwest, making daylight saving time permanent would mean that students would have to commute to schools in the pitch dark, well before dawn.

“It’s an issue that’s real. It affects not just our religious practice, but therefore it affects work. It affects school. It affects parents’ working ability. It has a ripple effect,” Motzen said. “A community that had a daily minyan (quorum of ten men for prayer) for 100 years may struggle to find a minyan if all the people need to go to work. And that has an effect on a community.”

At the hearing, lawmakers and witnesses — including an advocate for ending time changes, the leader of the National Golf Course Owners Association, a physician and neuroscientist and an automotive safety expert — largely agreed that the annual time changes should end, but differed on how.

“I think the message people got was many people do not want to have the clock changed, and as we heard in the hearing, there are different views of which of the two permanent times is better,” Motzen said.

Some witnesses and lawmakers argued in favor of making daylight saving time permanent, meaning later sunrises in the mornings and more daylight in the evenings year-round. Others argued for the opposite, making standard time permanent. 

Others argued that the time changes should be ended one way or the other, or said that Congress should mandate the end of the time changes but leave it to states to determine which time system to make permanent.