The Most Unhinged DEI Accusation Yet Goes to a Microsoft Font

Times New Roman Returns After Two Years

Secretary of State Marco Rubio just ordered every U. S. diplomat in the world to stop using the Calibri font.

His memo, sent December 9, 2025, has a subject line that says it all: “Return to Tradition: Times New Roman 14-Point Font Required for All Department Paper. ” The change is effective immediately.

Rubio called the two-year experiment with Calibri a failure that “achieved nothing except the degradation of the department’s official correspondence.”

The designer who created Calibri has a different view, and the history behind both fonts explains why this became a fight in the first place.

Rubio Frames Font as DEI Problem

Rubio’s memo does not treat this as a simple style preference.

He wrote that the switch back to Times New Roman would “restore decorum and professionalism” and “abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program. ” DEIA stands for diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.

The State Department confirmed the directive aligns with President Trump’s “One Voice for America’s Foreign Relations” policy, which calls for unified, formal communication across all diplomatic posts.

Starting December 11, 2025, every memo, cable, and official document must use Times New Roman in 14-point size.

Blinken Made the Change in 2023

Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken switched the department to Calibri in January 2023. He did it on the recommendation of the State Department’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion.

Blinken sent his own memo to staff with the subject line “The Times (New Roman) are A-Changin. ” The goal was accessibility.

Serif fonts like Times New Roman have small decorative strokes at the edges of letters, and those can cause problems for people who use screen readers or optical character recognition technology.

Blinken also bumped the font size from 14-point to 15-point.

Sans-Serif Fonts Are Easier to Read

The accessibility argument for Calibri is straightforward.

Sans-serif fonts lack the small lines and tails that decorate serif letters, so each character has a cleaner shape. For people with low vision or dyslexia, those simpler forms are easier to distinguish.

The Section 508 Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act requires federal agencies to make electronic information accessible to people with disabilities, and it specifically notes that serif fonts can “significantly degrade legibility” for people with vision problems.

The Americans with Disabilities Act guidelines also recommend sans-serif typefaces.

Rubio Says the Switch Did Not Work

Rubio’s memo acknowledged that the font change “was not among the department’s most illegal, immoral, radical or wasteful instances of DEIA. ” But he called it a failure anyway.

According to the directive, the number of “accessibility-based document remediation cases” at the State Department did not decline after the switch to Calibri.

Rubio argued that Calibri looks too informal and “clashes” with the department’s official letterhead.

He noted that the White House, Supreme Court, and other federal agencies all use serif fonts in their formal communications.

Times New Roman Dates to 1931

Times New Roman was not designed for government memos.

Stanley Morison, a British typographer working for the Monotype Corporation, created it for The Times of London newspaper.

Morison had publicly criticized the paper for poor printing quality, and the editors responded by hiring him to fix it.

He worked with artist Victor Lardent to develop a font that would fit more text on each page while staying readable. The Times debuted the new typeface on October 3, 1932.

It spread quickly and became one of the most widely used fonts in history.

Calibri Was Built for Screens

Dutch type designer Lucas de Groot created Calibri between 2002 and 2004.

Microsoft commissioned it as part of a project called the ClearType Font Collection, designed to make text look better on LCD monitors.

De Groot gave Calibri rounded edges and wide spacing to improve readability at small sizes.

Microsoft released it publicly in 2007 with Windows Vista and made it the default font in Office, replacing Times New Roman.

Calibri held that spot for 17 years until Microsoft switched to a new font called Aptos in 2024.

The Designer Calls It Absurd

De Groot learned about Rubio’s decision from news reports. He told CNN the reversal was “hilarious and also a bit of a sad decision.”

When asked why anyone would consider Calibri a “woke” font, he laughed and said he had no idea.

De Groot explained that he designed Calibri to be as readable as possible, especially for people with visual impairments.

He told The Independent the decision was “both hilarious and regrettable” and noted there were “sound reasons” for moving away from Times New Roman. He called Times “a step back into the past.

Three Fonts in 21 Years

The State Department has now cycled through three official typefaces in just over two decades.

Before 2004, diplomats typed their cables in Courier New, a monospace font IBM created in 1955 that looks like old typewriter text.

In February 2004, the department switched to Times New Roman 14-point, which one critic noted was a size “generally reserved for children’s books.”

That lasted 19 years until Blinken’s 2023 change to Calibri. Now Times New Roman is back after just two years away.

Each switch generated complaints from staffers who had grown used to the old standard.

Typography Carries Political Weight

Researchers have found that fonts send political signals whether designers intend them to or not.

Shannon Zenner, a professor at Elon University who studies typography and politics, told Dezeen that her research shows “Republicans tend to gravitate toward serif typefaces while Democrats lean toward sans-serif.”

She said the return to Times New Roman “functions, intentionally or not, as a political signal. ” Serif fonts are often seen as traditional and formal, while sans-serif fonts read as modern and progressive.

The State Department’s font choice, Zenner argued, has been “pulled into partisan narratives.

Part of a Larger Campaign

The font change fits a pattern. Since returning to office, President Trump has signed executive orders ending federal DEI programs and requiring recipients of federal funds to cut diversity-related initiatives.

The Interior Department removed Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth from the list of fee-free days at national parks.

The administration fired members of military academy advisory boards, arguing the institutions had become too “woke.”

Rubio has abolished the State Department’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion, the same office that recommended the Calibri switch in the first place.

A Font War With No Clear Winner

The debate over fonts will not end with this memo.

Some diplomats welcomed the return to Times New Roman, with one former staffer writing on social media that their “last three years at the state department were filled with awful serif-less fonts. ” Others called the whole thing “petty nonsense.”

De Groot, for his part, said the idea that a typeface could be woke “is kind of ridiculous. ” But in Washington, even the shape of a letter can become a battle line.

The next administration could switch it all back again with a single memo.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

Read more from this brand:

• US Now Requires Up to $15,000 Visa Bonds From Six African Countries
• Visiting the Louvre Just Got More Expensive for Americans
• Trump Spent $200 Million on a Self-Deportation App That Costs $7,500 Per Person