WASHINGTON, D.C. — The federal government confirmed Sunday that it has taken an hour from every American, effective 2:00 a.m., and has declined to specify where the hour is being held, when it will be returned, or what, if anything, is being done with it in the interim — a situation that Brent Eyewitness, Field Reporter, has been investigating since approximately 7:00 a.m., which his body insists is 6:00 a.m., which is part of the problem.
The taking was first flagged to Supposedly News’s attention by a post in a regional Facebook group, in which a concerned citizen identified only as “Debra” — profile photo: a golden retriever in a Santa hat, cover photo: a sunset over what appears to be Lake Murray, South Carolina — asked the question that nobody in the mainstream media had thought to ask:
“I wonder what Trump is going to do with all of those hours that the government stole from us last night. Inquiring minds want to know!!!!”
Four exclamation points. Debra is not calm about this. Debra should not be calm about this. Supposedly News is not calm about this.
We reached out to the White House for comment. We reached out to the Department of Energy, which has historically administered Daylight Saving Time policy. We reached out to the Department of Transportation, which also has jurisdiction. We reached out to a man named Gerald at the Bureau of Time and Temporal Affairs, which does not exist but which we felt should exist, and whose absence we are now reporting as a separate story.
None of them have told us what is being done with the hour.
The Investigation Begins
Supposedly News’s investigation into the whereabouts of the stolen hour began at what our phones said was 7:15 a.m. and what our bodies said was a time that should not be happening yet. We started, as all serious investigations do, with the Facebook thread.
Debra’s post had, by the time we found it, accumulated 47 comments. They broke down as follows:
Fourteen comments agreed with Debra’s premise entirely and offered theories about what the government was doing with the hours, ranging from “stockpiling them for the election” to “selling them to China” to one commenter named Randy who wrote only “WAKE UP” in capitals and then did not elaborate, presumably because he was awake and felt that covered it.
Eleven comments attempted to explain that Daylight Saving Time has been federal law since 1918 and predates the current administration by 108 years, and that no individual president controls its implementation, and that the hour is not literally stored anywhere. These comments were largely responded to with the word “sheep” or, in two cases, a gif of a sheep, which is a rebuttal format that Supposedly News acknowledges is difficult to counter with additional facts.
Eight comments were about something else entirely. These are the people who read the first three words of a post and respond to what they expected it to say rather than what it said. They are in every comment section. They are among us. They cannot be stopped.
Six comments were people tagging other people with no additional context, which is the Facebook equivalent of tapping someone on the shoulder and pointing.
Five comments were from a woman named Carol who appeared to be having a separate and unrelated dispute with Debra about a neighborhood matter and was using the thread as a venue for it. We did not get involved. This is not our beat.
Three comments, encouragingly, correctly identified both the mechanism of Daylight Saving Time and its legislative history while also acknowledging that the outcome — losing an hour of sleep with no individual choice in the matter, enforced by federal law — is genuinely annoying and that Debra’s frustration, if not her attribution, is entirely valid.
These three comments had the fewest likes. This is how comment sections work. This is fine.
Who Actually Has The Hour
Supposedly News can confirm, following an exhaustive investigation that lasted until we had finished our second cup of coffee, that the hour is not being held by the current administration, the previous administration, the Deep State, the Federal Reserve, a foreign power, the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates, the yogurt industry, or any of the other entities that Randy appears to be awake about.
The hour is, technically speaking, nowhere. Time does not accumulate. When a clock is set forward, the hour between 2:00 a.m. and 3:00 a.m. does not go somewhere. It simply does not occur. It is a bureaucratic fiction imposed on a physical reality that does not recognize it. The sun rose this morning at the same angle it always rises. The earth rotated at the same speed. The hour was not taken. The hour was renamed. The hour was told it was now a different hour. The hour, which is not sentient, complied.
Your body, which is sentient and has a circadian rhythm calibrated to actual solar patterns and not congressional schedules, did not comply. This is the real crime. This is what Debra is actually angry about. She is right to be angry. She has identified the correct victim — herself, her sleep, her Sunday morning — and assigned the blame creatively, which is more than most people do before 8 a.m.
What Trump Is, In Fact, Doing With The Hour
Supposedly News, in the interest of answering Debra’s question directly, has compiled a list of things the president could theoretically be doing with a stolen hour, in the event that one was available:
Posting on social media, which the president does at a rate that suggests he has found additional hours from somewhere regardless of DST. Golfing, which requires more than an hour but which the hour could contribute to. Watching cable news coverage of himself, which is a known activity that an extra hour would accommodate comfortably. Signing executive orders, of which there have been enough that an additional hour seems like it would help with the volume. Calling world leaders at times they find inconvenient, an activity that the removal of daylight in the evening might, arguably, make marginally easier to schedule.
We put these possibilities to the White House press office. They did not respond. This is consistent with their general availability to Supposedly News, which we attribute to our credibility level of 14% and not to any sensitivity about the hour question.
The Legislative Record, For Debra
Debra — and we say this with the warmth of journalists who have read her Facebook post four times and find her energy extremely relatable — the Daylight Saving Time system she is correctly furious about was established by the Standard Time Act of 1918, amended by the Uniform Time Act of 1966, and has been modified by Congress on several subsequent occasions, most recently in 2005, under an administration that was not the current one.
The Sunshine Protection Act, which would end the practice entirely and return Debra’s hour on a permanent basis, passed the Senate unanimously in 2022 and has since stalled in the House, which means that the people most directly responsible for the continued theft of Debra’s hour are the members of the House of Representatives who have not scheduled it for a floor vote — a group that is bipartisan, geographically diverse, and probably also tired this morning.
The current administration has not moved to end Daylight Saving Time, restore the hour, or comment on Debra’s post, which has now been shared fourteen times and has a laughing emoji reaction from a woman named Patricia who may or may not be Carol under a different account.
The Conclusion, Such As It Is
Debra is right that something was taken. Debra is right that the government did it. Debra is right that nobody asked her. Debra is right that it is annoying and that the inquiring minds want to know.
What Debra may wish to update is the filing system for her outrage, which currently has this particular crime attributed to the wrong department. The hour is a bipartisan heist. It has been conducted by every administration since Woodrow Wilson. It will be conducted by the next one too, unless the House schedules a vote on a bill that passed the Senate unanimously, which — and Brent Eyewitness wants to be clear about this — they should absolutely do, and the fact that they haven’t is its own kind of scandal, if a quieter one than Debra’s post suggests.
The hour remains unaccounted for. The government remains tight-lipped. Randy remains awake. Carol remains present in the thread for reasons that are hers alone.
And Debra — four exclamation points, golden retriever in a Santa hat, correctly furious about the right thing for slightly complicated reasons — is out there asking the questions. Possibly not the right questions. But questions. On a Sunday morning. Before coffee.
Supposedly News respects that. We were also up before coffee. The hour, we maintain, was ours.
Brent Eyewitness filed this report from his kitchen, where it is either 9:00 a.m. or 8:00 a.m. depending on which clock you trust. He does not trust any of the clocks. He trusts Debra’s energy. He does not fully trust Debra’s research. He wishes her well.