The State Department has reversed a 2023 font change and ordered diplomats to use Times New Roman, 14-point, for official documents, the department told NPR. Secretary of State Marco Rubio directed the return from Calibri, saying consistent formatting strengthens credibility and supports a unified departmental identity.
Times New Roman had been the department’s standard typeface from about 2004 until 2023, when then-Secretary Antony Blinken switched the default to Calibri as part of updates intended to improve accessibility. Rubio’s cable to U.S. embassies and consulates — obtained and reported by news outlets — called that earlier change “another wasteful DEIA program,” saying it did not meaningfully reduce the department’s accessibility-related remediation cases.
Calibri is a sans-serif typeface, which lacks the small decorative strokes called serifs that appear on letters in serif faces such as Times New Roman. Accessibility experts caution that serifs can make printed text harder to read for some people. Kristen Shinohara, who leads the Center for Accessibility and Inclusion Research at the Rochester Institute of Technology, told NPR that serif flourishes can worsen readability for people with learning or reading disabilities, including dyslexia, and for people with low vision. The Americans with Disabilities Act and related guidance generally favor sans-serif fonts for physical signage and screen displays because they tend to be more legible in those contexts.
The State Department’s statement stressed formality, saying, in effect, that Times New Roman and serif fonts more broadly are “more formal and professional.” The department did not respond to NPR questions about whether the change could reduce accessibility for some users.
Times New Roman was originally designed for the British newspaper The Times in the 1920s and became widely used in print and in Microsoft products through the 1990s. Microsoft made Calibri its default in 2007, citing a design optimized for screens; in 2023 Microsoft replaced Calibri with a new sans-serif, Aptos.
Rubio framed the reinstatement as consistent with President Trump’s February directive, “One Voice for America’s Foreign Relations,” which calls for a unified, professional voice in U.S. communications. Observers also see the move as part of a broader pattern in the current administration of rolling back diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and emphasizing aesthetics and symbolism — from office redesigns to proposals about federal architecture. The font decision arrives alongside other federal actions that have changed agency language and content, such as the removal of certain health-related webpages at Health and Human Services and guidance at the Department of Energy asking employees to avoid specific terms.