The State Department Just Banned a Font for Being Too Woke

Calibri Is Out, Times New Roman Is Back

Secretary of State Marco Rubio just declared war on a typeface. On December 10, 2025, he ordered every U.S. diplomat in the world to stop using Calibri and switch back to Times New Roman for all official documents. The reason?

He called the Biden-era font choice a wasteful diversity program that degraded the department’s correspondence. The font’s creator says he’s baffled.

Disability advocates say the change will make government documents harder to read for millions of Americans.

And somewhere in the middle of it all, a 93-year-old typeface designed for a British newspaper is back in charge of American diplomacy.

Rubio Calls Calibri a Wasteful DEI Program

Rubio’s memo, sent to all diplomatic posts worldwide, mandates that the agency use only Times New Roman in 14-point font for official communications.

The directive is the latest action by the Trump administration to roll back diversity and inclusion initiatives. The change took effect immediately.

In his memo, titled “Return to Tradition,” Rubio called Calibri “informal” and said it clashed with State Department letterhead.

He also labeled it a “radical” diversity initiative, even though it’s just a font that comes pre-installed on every computer.

Blinken Switched to Calibri in 2023

The Biden administration adopted Calibri in 2023, and the choice came from the State Department’s diversity and inclusion office, which has since been disbanded under Rubio.

The font was chosen to make documents easier to read for people with visual impairments.

At the time, then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Times New Roman could create accessibility issues for people who use screen readers or optical character recognition technology.

The switch caused grumbling among some staffers who preferred the old font, but the reasoning was straightforward: help people read better.

Rubio Says Calibri Degraded Official Documents

Rubio wrote that switching to Calibri achieved nothing except degrading the department’s official correspondence.

A State Department spokesperson told reporters that Times New Roman is “more formal and professional” and that serif fonts remain the standard in courts and legislatures.

The spokesperson said the change aligns with Trump’s “One Voice for America’s Foreign Relations” directive, which calls for a unified voice in all communications.

Rubio acknowledged in his memo that Calibri was not among the department’s “most illegal, immoral, radical or wasteful” examples of diversity programs. He banned it anyway.

State Department Fonts Have Changed Three Times

Times New Roman had been the State Department’s official font for nearly 20 years until the 2023 change. Before 2004, the State Department used Courier New.

So in about two decades, American diplomacy has gone from a typewriter-style font to a newspaper font to a screen-friendly font and back to the newspaper font.

The department’s typography has now changed three times in 21 years, with each shift reflecting the priorities of whoever is in charge.

The Font’s Designer Is Baffled

Lucas de Groot, the Dutch designer who created Calibri, said he was shocked by the news. He called the decision “hilarious and also a bit of a sad decision.”

When asked about his font being labeled “woke,” de Groot chuckled and said he has no idea what makes it political.

He told reporters that there were sound reasons for moving away from Times New Roman, noting that Calibri performs exceptionally well at small sizes on standard office monitors while serif fonts tend to appear more distorted.

De Groot designed the font to be friendly and readable, not to make a political statement.

Calibri Was Built for Computer Screens

Microsoft commissioned Calibri in the early 2000s as one of six typefaces designed for ClearType, software technology that made text easier to read on screens.

De Groot optimized the width and curvature of each letter to be easy to read, and Calibri replaced Times New Roman as the default font in Microsoft Office in 2007.

He started the design in 2002 with the goal of creating something modern and friendly, without the decorative hooks called serifs.

Microsoft used Calibri as its default for 17 years before replacing it with another sans-serif font called Aptos in 2023.

Federal Rules Favor Sans-Serif Fonts

The ADA and ABA accessibility standards require sans-serif fonts in several contexts, including signage and certain display screens.

Federal guidelines note that for people with low vision, serifs can significantly degrade legibility, and using sans-serif is especially important for digital content read on screens.

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which governs federal accessibility requirements, considers serif fonts like Times New Roman less accessible than sans-serif fonts like Calibri.

The State Department did not respond to questions about how the font change affects accessibility compliance.

Disability Groups Call It a Step Backward

Maria Town, president of the American Association of People with Disabilities, said ending the use of Calibri is a direct step backward for millions of people with low vision who rely on digital accessibility features.

Molly Eagan, CEO of VISIONS, a nonprofit serving visually impaired people in New York, said font choices directly affect whether information is truly usable.

Accessibility expert Kristen Shinohara from the Rochester Institute of Technology said the decorative flourishes on serif fonts can make reading more difficult for people with dyslexia or low vision. The organizations urged the State Department to reconsider.

Times New Roman Was Made for Print

Times New Roman is a serif typeface commissioned for the British newspaper The Times in 1931, and it has become one of the most popular typefaces of all time.

The Times hired typographer Stanley Morison in 1929 to create a new text font, and he supervised Victor Lardent, an advertising artist, who drew the letterforms.

The design prioritized two goals: efficiency, maximizing text per line to save paper, and readability in print. It became the default font in Microsoft Word in the 1990s until Calibri replaced it in 2007.

The font was never designed for screens.

Font Change Fits Broader Anti-DEI Campaign

The Trump administration has issued numerous executive orders dismantling DEI initiatives in federal agencies, foreign service, and federal contracts.

The administration put pressure on universities and schools, threatening to withhold federal funding from those with DEI programs, though a judge struck down some of those efforts in August.

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

Growing anti-DEI backlash has also pushed scores of private companies to scale back their own inclusion initiatives.

A Font Becomes a Political Symbol

Type designer Jonathan Hoefler, who created the Biden-Harris campaign typography and the widely used Gotham typeface, said calling a font “woke” is ridiculous.

He noted that typefaces are simply designed to solve different problems: Times New Roman was designed for newspaper text, and Calibri was designed for screens.

Rubio has already abolished the diversity offices and initiatives that recommended the original font change. The font is gone.

The office that chose it is gone.

And millions of government documents will now be a little harder to read for people who need accessibility features most.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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