Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri

> U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday ordered diplomats to return to using Times New Roman font in official communications, calling his predecessor Antony Blinken's decision to adopt Calibri a "wasteful" diversity move, according to an internal department cable seen by Reuters.

What a waste of government time and spending.

Calibri is woke?

I guess I’m glad they’re focusing on this rather than breaking something else in society

The point being that if the change to Calibri has been done to improve accessibility (hence: inclusion) that makes it woke.

Which is stupid, of course, especially considering that sans-serif fonts improve readability on screens for most people, not for a minority.

EDIT: extraneous "don't" in the middle of a sentence

Tilting at windmills...

Tilting at wingdings

From the article:

> A cable dated December 9 sent to all U.S. diplomatic posts said that typography shapes the professionalism of an official document and Calibri is informal compared to serif typefaces. > "To restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program, the Department is returning to Times New Roman as its standard typeface," the cable said.

I don't read that purely as an "anti-woke" move, why did Reuters only highlight that part and not the bit about professionalism? I do indeed agree that serifs look more authoritative.

Point is they're doing both, at once.

Nah, the state department is big enough to do both at the same time - at least it would be at full staffing levels.

So what next? Wheelchair ramps? Seats for the elderly and the pregnant? Accessibility features don't displace or even inconvenience the majority in any manner. They only make facilities accessible to an additional crowd, who should be getting them as a matter of right in the first place. What's the end game here?

Cruelty is the point

The font is not masculine enough.

The endgame is to normalize punishing groups/individuals for any reason on a whim of the ones in charge. Start with minorities and people who can’t defend themselves, then later you can do easier to anyone who gets inconvenient. Despotism 101.

Authoritative or Authoritarian?

Fasces or fascist?

How much will it cost to change fonts?

Because, even if there is a good argument to replace Calibri on grounds of professionalism, the cable still explicitly mentions the "anti-woke" aspect. At best, it's another sideswipe aimed at minorities and people who represent them. At worst, it's 'doing something wrong purely because of prejudice'.

I read the title of this and as I could not wrap my head around the idea of "Rubio" here actually meaning Marco Rubio, I assumed this was a font name, but also laughing to myself just how hilariously absurd it would be for the Secretary of State to involved in picking fonts...only to click the link and discover that yes, it is exactly that absurd.

Many things labeled as woke benefit the masses like environmental protection.

I guess people like to stay asleep.

Will be a rough awakening

> To restore decorum and professionalism

Given the complete absence of either in the current administration, this is clearly not the real reason. So “woke” is the only explanation left.

It's just ragebaiting. Don't take the bait.

If I say I bought a yellow car, nobody cares. If I say I bought a yellow car to troll the libtards, now everybody is mad even though what I said makes no sense and it all has little consequence anyway.

They've been talking about rolling back "DEIA" since they got in power. The A is "accessibility" so they're not hiding this.

That does not make it right.

If it is about professionalism, why mention DEIA at all? It's just virtue-signalling. Reuters realized that and pointed it out.

To change tens to hundreds of millions of documents, roughly 50-200M USD.

A dollar a doc? Sounds like a sweet job.

It’s only for the department of state though, and the previous cost to change to Calibri was about $145,000 over two fiscal years.

that was the cost of additional a11y remediation, likely the direct cost of using a different font/typeface going forward was the time it took for people to read the memo and get used to change the formatting (maybe even set a new default, maybe change templates).

https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/full_text_of_marco_rubio_...

of course simply comparing years without a control we have no way of knowing the effect of the change (well, if we were to look at the previous years at least we could see if this 145K difference was somehow significant or not)

> Will be a rough awakening

I used to believe that people would wake up, but that does not seem to be what happens. They are just herded around by the next dog that comes along.

"anything we don't like is 'diversity' [woke]"

in this case "Rubio" means that ICE would deport him if they saw him randomly on the streets of Chicago

Did you have that kind of reaction, that it’s absurd, when Blinken ordered the use of Calibri after ~20 years of consistent use of Times New Roman?

It is objectively more concerning and “absurd”, regardless of “team”, that Blinken arbitrarily introduced fragmentation by adding an additional font to official government communications when a convention had been established across government to use Times New Roman.

"wasteful diversity move"

Wild. I'm curious now if someone has an ordered list of fonts from the gayest to the straightest.

Or maybe the government should have a common convention regarding official government communications, which Blinken added fragmentation to by arbitrarily changing the font away from Times New Roman.

I'm way past raging—just laughing at the stupidity at this point.

The levels of pettiness in this administration know no bounds. I'm sure they'll forbid the use of "woke", and require all government employees to say "I terminated sleep this morning".

No, Times New Roman is old fashioned, so moving to something more readable doesn't shock me.

Can you cite a source that Blinken's decision was arbitrary? Because Rubio himself is quoted here as attributing a reason for the change (i.e. that it wasn't arbitrary).

I'm also interested to hear your thoughts on the arbitrariness of Microsoft's decision to switch to Calibri in 2007 - imagine the "fragmentation" that must have caused across the business world!

Font changes are cruel?

Sure, this is a good point, but only if you completely ignore the the accessibility gains provided by the change. But I'm guessing rationality wasn't on the menu when this was written.

Oh, you're just obsessed with this, aren't you?

What an odd take. Every administration does this sort of petty stuff. nothing new under the sun.

> if a person is visually impaired, why wouldn't they have tools at their disposal to make things readable?

If it's on a screen in a browser, probably. If it's printed, or on a display not under a reader's control, probably not.

FWIW, I'm partially split. I generally prefer sans-serif overall - have for decades. I think I slightly prefer serif for some printed material visually, but... when I actually have to engage and read it, for long periods, I think I tend to opt for sans-serif. Noticed this on my kindle years ago, and kindle reader now - I usually swap to sans-serif options (I think it's been my default for a while).

You seem weirdly worked up over this.

Blinken made no public statements on this until he was asked about it. He did not come out and say for example, "For too long, the vision impaired community have been discriminated against by the systemic bias via the use of Times New Roman. Today we are taking action to change this and restore the dignity of those this font has long oppressed", but Rubio just did exactly this. For all I can tell the actual decision was a recommendation made by an internal team doing an accessibility review.

They can be if a font is chosen due to it being easier to read for some people and then it's reverted so that those people will then struggle to read. It's akin to removing ramps from shops to make it awkward for those in wheelchairs.

Petty as in 'small and does not really matter' or petty as in 'vindictive'. All administrations do many small things that may not ultimately have much impact, but often those may be for benign reasons. Understanding the reasoning behind the decisions would help in determining what kind of 'petty' this is.

Thanks for linking that.

Sadly way more informative than our traditional outlets.

This is demonstrably false. Previous administrations have not. It used to be normal to do things like keeping cabinet members appointed by their opponents or not put up a mocking picture of your predecessor in the white house.

> What a waste of government time and spending

Was the switch to Calibri in 2023 also a waste of time and money, or are font switches only bad when the Trump administration does them?

> It used to be normal to do things like keeping cabinet members appointed by their opponents

This particular thing was not all that common between Presidents who succeed normally by election. I think the most recent was Robert Gates serving as SecDef across the Bush II/Obama transition, before that there were five kept across the Reagan/Bush I transition, and no more in the post-WWII period.

(It’s true that the pettiness level in this Administration is unprecedented, but this is not a valid example.)

If the belief is that switching a font is wasteful, why is the solution is to switch fonts again?

The only other place I’m familiar with people making grandiose announcements about their font selection, other than a font company announcement, is here on HN.

True, I didn’t mean it was routine but it was somewhat normal. I just wanted to show the incredible range of professional behaviour that has disappeared.

> It was Blinken that arbitrarily introduced

The _second paragraph_ of TFA gives a reason for the introduction. Please explain how you came to the conclusion that the change was arbitrary.

Both.

It's so utterly juvenile and unprofessional. The kind of thing a petulant twelve year-old does for attention.

If changing fonts once was a wasteful empty gesture that they used to pat themselves on the back and which didn't benefit anyone, then isn't changing it a second time the exact same thing?

Calibri is a tool to make things more readable

People do have tools to make things more readable. Some of those tools are professionally designed fonts and typefaces which are easier for people with low vision to read.

You sound like someone saying we shouldn’t have ramps and elevators because crutches exist.

> They haven't. And you really think changing to Calibri benefitted anyone?

The wild thing is that even if you don’t respect the switch to Calibri on the grounds that it doesn’t really benefit anyone and is therefore wasted effort for little or no gain, the decision to switch back is a decision to double that wasted effort.

That said, it’s clear from the daring fireball story linked in the thread that this is being super overblown and Rubio isn’t really making an argument that Calibri is wasting money. This is an arbitrary decision.

Absolutely vindictive. He goes out of his way to cite "DEI" in his comments.

The president of the US struggles to stay awake in his brief detours from the golf course. It’s a perfect metaphor for the country. All seriousness has left the building.

No, you see, it's only wasteful when the OTHER guy does it. /s

If I were to guess, the switch to Calibri in the first place was because people were able to use the MS default in practice instead of having to hand change it, or use "official" templates, which imo is probably more appropriate anyway.

I think Calibri is arguably a better font, to me the bigger issue is the commercial license used in govt works.

> The levels of pettiness in this administration know no bounds

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelt...

> What's the end game here?

There's no end game in particular.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelt...

All paragraph text to to use the proper manly IMPACT in the future.