Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri

IMO Calibri and Times New Roman are both poor choices: they are not free. The US Government’s works are not generally subject to copyright, and IMO it’s rather obnoxious for their fonts to be restricted. Also, Calibri is specifically a Microsoft font, and maybe the government should be a bit less beholden to Microsoft.

IMO the government should pick something available under an appropriate free license or commission a new font for the purpose.

(I personally much prefer Times New Roman to Calibri for printed documents, but that’s neither here nor there.)

This is my view as well. That being said, Time New Roman is marginally better because there are several good, modern open source alternatives with the same metrics that can be substituted. And there's good tool support virtually everywhere for those alternatives, like in TeX.

There is a metric-compatible open alternative to Calibri (Carlito) but it seems more vulnerable to lawyer shenanigans and doesn't have extensive tool support.