It's actually an enumerated power under Article I, Section 8, Clause 5:
> [The Congress shall have Power...] To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures; ...
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C5-1/...
I would be less surprised if it were the commerce power used to uphold time zone coordination - for the promotion and regularity of interstate commerce etc etc - but even that seems fairly weak.
Then there's the actual enforcement angle - time zones are just a social convention whereby people in a given area pretend that the time is slightly different than it 'really' is (local solar time). There's no reason local / state government and businesses can't post / operate on different hours, and leave federal bodies to operate on whatever 'federal time' they want. This already happens in parts of the world where the official time is locally inappropriate, such as Eucla in Australia or Xinjiang in China.
Obviously the optimal solution here is to coordinate a time change at all levels of government, but failing that there are other options.
It is the majority opinion of people that study chronobiology (circadian rhythms) and sleep researchers, as issued via their professional societies:
* https://srbr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/SRBR-Statement-o...
* http://www.chronobiocanada.com/official-statements
* https://sleepresearchsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/...
* https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.8780
* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
* https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35382618/
* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...
* https://www.ama-assn.org/public-health/prevention-wellness/s...
* https://esrs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/To_the_EU_Commiss...
From a public health perspective, all-year DST is not good, and all-year Standard Time is what should be done.
"Morons" was an overly dramatic way of putting it but it is very clearly the technically deficient choice as will be apparent to anyone who bothers to consult the history books. The US already attempted permanent DST in 1974 but quickly repealed it. Russia similarly tried it out from 2011 to 2014 before switching to permanent standard time instead. The UK also tried it at one point before abandoning it. Mexico might have tried it for the longest, from 1996 until 2022 when they too switched to permanent standard time. (Actually I'm unclear why Mexico gave it up. They're far enough south that the difference between the two shouldn't be particularly impactful.)
The correct answer here is obvious. (This being HN I guess personal political rants aren't really the thing to do so I should at least link to some actual literature on the topic. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physiology/articles/10....)
The special auth. from the Fed's is needed to switch to "permanent summer time" (and, possibly advocating for year round "summer time" gives the state politicians cover to do nothing, because "their hands are tied...").
It was bullshit from day one. The origin of the state's rights argument was slave state's attempting to force free states to round up fugitive slave and return them to the slave states.