It’s the rise of the Roman Empire at the U.S. State Department — Times New Roman, that is.
In a memo to the department on Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio directed U.S. diplomats worldwide to use Times New Roman 14-point font for official documents, reversing a Biden-era directive to use Calibri.
The memo, titled “Return to Tradition,” said that the new standard font would “reflect the same dignity, consistency, and formality expected in official government correspondence.”
Times New Roman 14, a serif font, had been the State Department standard since 2004, but in 2023, the agency switched to Calibri, a sans serif typeface, at the recommendation of the Secretary’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion to mitigate accessibility issues for individuals with disabilities.
With a sans serif typeface, the letters do not include tails and wings on their edges as serif typefaces do.
While the Biden administration’s switch in typeface “was not among the Department’s most illegal, immoral, radical, or wasteful instances of DEIA,” the memo said, it was “nonetheless cosmetic.”
According to the memo, even after the 2023 order, the number of accessibility-based document mediation cases faced by the agency was the same as the year before and the costs of remediation increased by $145,000, or 20%.
“Switching to Calibri achieved nothing except the degradation of the department’s official correspondence,” Rubio wrote in his memo.
In a statement to NBC News, a State Department spokesperson said, “Serif typefaces remain the standard in courts, legislatures, and across federal agencies where the permanence and authority of the written record are paramount. Aligning the Department’s practice with this standard ensures our communications reflect the same dignity, consistency, and formality expected in official government correspondence.”
The spokesperson added, “This formatting standard aligns with the President’s One Voice for America’s Foreign Relations directive, underscoring the Department’s responsibility to present a unified, professional voice in all communications.”
The move comes amid a wider push by the Trump administration against diversity, equity and inclusion programs that were embraced by the Biden administration.
Last week, the Interior Department unveiled next year’s “fee-free days” at the nation’s national parks, removing several holidays — including Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January and Juneteenth in June — that were previously included on the “fee-free” calendar.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration moved to ban DEI programs from federal agencies and asked recipients of federal funds, like schools, colleges and nonprofit groups, to cut programming related to DEI.
