Secretary of State Marco Rubio has now taken his battle in opposition to federal variety initiatives to an unexpectedly symbolic battleground: typefaces.
On Tuesday, he issued an order stopping the State Division’s official use of the Calibri font—reversing a Biden-era effort to enhance accessibility, which Rubio blasted as “wasteful.”
An inside cable instructed U.S. diplomats to return to Occasions New Roman in all official communications, framing the transfer as a bid to “restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program” to raised align with President Donald Trump’s “One Voice for America’s Foreign Relations” directive.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio
For Rubio, the battle was by no means nearly readability. His order explicitly blamed “radical” variety, fairness, inclusion, and accessibility applications for the shift away from Occasions New Roman, arguing that Calibri’s rounded shapes had been too “informal” and even “clashed” with the division’s letterhead.
He additionally reset the usual sort dimension again to 14-point, undoing former Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s 15-point requirement—a tiny change, maybe, however one which The New York Occasions notes had irked some veteran diplomats who resented having to reformat their previous templates.
Occasions New Roman has lengthy been the division’s home fashion. It changed Courier New in 2004 and remained unchallenged for practically 20 years. A State Division official confirmed to the Occasions that Rubio’s new directive, cheekily titled “Return to Tradition: Times New Roman 14-Point Font Required for All Department Paper,” is genuine.
It’s a minor change on paper, however the order suits neatly into the administration’s wider marketing campaign to tear down DEI initiatives. Blinken’s 2023 shift to Calibri stemmed from the State Division’s Workplace of Range and Inclusion—an workplace that Rubio has since hollowed out.
That workplace emphasised accessibility: Calibri’s rounded shapes, constant proportions, and wider spacing had been meant to assist readers with low imaginative and prescient or dyslexia and enhance compatibility with display readers.
Rubio, nevertheless, dismissed your complete rationale. The change to Calibri, he mentioned, “was not among the department’s most illegal, immoral, radical or wasteful instances of D.E.I.A,” however that it failed even by itself phrases, citing inside knowledge exhibiting that “accessibility-based document remediation cases” hadn’t declined.
“Switching to Calibri achieved nothing except the degradation of the department’s official correspondence,” he mentioned.
His directive nods not simply to forms however to aesthetics. Echoing Trump’s push for classical structure in federal buildings, Rubio leaned on the origins of serif typefaces in Roman antiquity.
Serif fonts like Occasions New Roman, the order argued, carry “tradition, formality and ceremony,” and are nonetheless utilized by the White Home, the Supreme Courtroom, and even on the fuselage of Air Drive One.
Many diplomats have bristled at Rubio’s adjustments to the division’s construction and management, which have already strained morale.
And this isn’t the primary time that the administration’s obsession with tradition wars has produced head-scratching outcomes. On the Pentagon, Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth got here underneath hearth in March after his division mistakenly focused a photograph of the historic B-29 Enola Homosexual—the airplane that dropped the primary atomic bomb on Hiroshima—just because the phrase “gay” is in its title.
The bigger political context is unattainable to disregard. Since returning to the White Home, Trump has aggressively moved to dismantle federal DEI applications and discourage their use within the personal sector.
And now a typeface has been swept into the battle.
Calibri could seem to be an unlikely casualty in Trump’s conflict on “woke,” however on this political local weather, even a font can develop into a proxy battle over who will get to outline professionalism.
