Secretary of State Marco Rubio has now taken his fight against federal diversity initiatives to an unexpectedly symbolic battleground: typefaces.
On Tuesday, he issued an order stopping the State Department’s official use of the Calibri font—reversing a Biden-era effort to improve accessibility, which Rubio blasted as “wasteful.”
An internal cable instructed U.S. diplomats to return to Times New Roman in all official communications, framing the move as a bid to “restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program” to better align with President Donald Trump’s “One Voice for America’s Foreign Relations” directive.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio
For Rubio, the fight was never just about readability. His order explicitly blamed “radical” diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility programs for the shift away from Times New Roman, arguing that Calibri’s rounded shapes were too “informal” and even “clashed” with the department’s letterhead.
He also reset the standard type size back to 14-point, undoing former Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s 15-point requirement—a tiny change, perhaps, but one that The New York Times notes had irked some veteran diplomats who resented having to reformat their old templates.
Times New Roman has long been the department’s house style. It replaced Courier New in 2004 and remained unchallenged for nearly two decades. A State Department official confirmed to the Times that Rubio’s new directive, cheekily titled “Return to Tradition: Times New Roman 14-Point Font Required for All Department Paper,” is authentic.
It’s a minor change on paper, but the order fits neatly into the administration’s wider campaign to tear down DEI initiatives. Blinken’s 2023 shift to Calibri stemmed from the State Department’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion—an office that Rubio has since hollowed out.
That office emphasized accessibility: Calibri’s rounded shapes, consistent proportions, and wider spacing were meant to help readers with low vision or dyslexia and improve compatibility with screen readers.
Rubio, however, dismissed the entire rationale. The switch to Calibri, he said, “was not among the department’s most illegal, immoral, radical or wasteful instances of D.E.I.A,” but that it failed even on its own terms, citing internal data showing that “accessibility-based document remediation cases” hadn’t declined.
“Switching to Calibri achieved nothing except the degradation of the department’s official correspondence,” he said.
His directive nods not just to bureaucracy but to aesthetics. Echoing Trump’s push for classical architecture in federal buildings, Rubio leaned on the origins of serif typefaces in Roman antiquity.
Serif fonts like Times New Roman, the order argued, carry “tradition, formality and ceremony,” and are still used by the White House, the Supreme Court, and even on the fuselage of Air Force One.
Many diplomats have bristled at Rubio’s changes to the department’s structure and leadership, which have already strained morale.
And this isn’t the first time that the administration’s obsession with culture wars has produced head-scratching results. At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth came under fire in March after his department mistakenly targeted a photo of the historic B-29 Enola Gay—the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima—simply because the word “gay” is in its name.
The larger political context is impossible to ignore. Since returning to the White House, Trump has aggressively moved to dismantle federal DEI programs and discourage their use in the private sector.
And now a typeface has been swept into the fight.
Calibri may seem like an unlikely casualty in Trump’s war on “woke,” but in this political climate, even a font can become a proxy battle over who gets to define professionalism.
