Marco Rubio bans Calibri font at State Department for being too DEI

Calibri Line is the latest government employee to be fired from the Trump administration for his association with diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility.

In an action that sounds like a story from The Onion (and would almost certainly be the subject of Saturday Night Live or South Park), US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has banned the font and ordered diplomats to use Times New Roman for official documents instead, the New York Times reported after obtaining a leaked memo on the matter.

Calibri, a sans-serif font, appears to have been adopted in 2023 during Biden’s term. He was selected by the department’s then-DeI office, which has since been disbanded under Rubio amid the Trump administration’s anti-DEI directives.

The font was chosen in an effort to make documents easier to read for the visually impaired. Sans-serif fonts are fonts that do not have swirls and decorative lines at the ends of letters. With their clean lines and slightly wider letter spacing, they are considered accessible to people with issues ranging from dyslexia to low vision (although research into how serifs themselves affect readability has been inconclusive).

Rubio’s memo designated Times New Roman as his official line during his term, stating that it would work to “restore decorum and professionalism” to documents. Rubio did acknowledge in the memo that Calibri was not the “most illegal, unethical, radical, or wasteful” example of DEI in his view, but he still rebuked the line for contributing to the “deterioration” of the State Department’s official correspondence.

Many people across the political spectrum hate Calibri (according to an informal survey of TechCrunch writers) but even so, this is a harsh criticism of the line.

Apparently, there were rumblings within the department in 2023 when Calibri was first approved, the New York Times reported. Font choices inspire the same kind of love/hate feelings that sports teams do. Everyone has their own favorites and rivalries.

While Calibri declined to comment to TechCrunch about how woke it actually is, many people agree that Times New Roman is a particularly ancient font. Even The New York Times stopped using it nearly two decades ago.

The State Department did not immediately respond to our request for comment.