In the hallway outside the public advocate’s office in New York, on the 15th floor of the monumental David N. Dinkins Manhattan Municipal Building, a metal sign on the wall states that the office has walk-in hours from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday to Thursday. But the door is locked, and a paper sign on it has a contradictory message: “The Office of the Public Advocate is operating on a hybrid schedule and is only receiving constituents with an appointment.” Visitors are instructed to send an email or call a number if they want assistance.The sign on the door is not a holdover from some earlier stage of the coronavirus pandemic. It reflects the ongoing practice of the office, a 55-person agency with a budget just under $5 million that serves as a sort of ombudsman for residents seeking assistance with city services or regulations. Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, first elected to the office in 2019, has decided for the foreseeable future to require employees to work in-person only two days per week, and the agency is therefore limiting public access to the actual office. “We’re modeling the hybrid,” said Kevin Fagan, its deputy communications director. “We’ve been calling on the city to adopt hybrid models where possible, to do remote work for health purposes and because that’s the way of the workforce right now, so that’s how we’re operating here at this point.”

The reduction of direct interface between members of the public and the people being paid to work on their behalf represents a new normal. The diminishment of access isn’t driven by budget cuts; many agencies are in fact flush with funding as a result of the federal government’s pandemic recovery spending.Rather, the shift is being driven by government officials seeking to accommodate a workforce that is as reluctant to give up the remote-work option as are many counterparts in the private sector.Elizabeth Whitehouse, chief public policy officer at the Council of State Governments, said that government officials are grappling with a labor shortage caused by an aging workforce, a skills gap and uncompetitive pay levels that the temporary surge of federal funds does little to address. As a result, she said, government supervisors feel they have little choice but to offer flexible work arrangements as an inducement to hire and retain.

For government workers, it can be easier not to have to deal with the public in an unmediated way, with all the unexpected demands and drama that can come with that.

Take, for example, the process for obtaining a license as a building contractor in Maryland. The Maryland Home Improvement Commission, which oversees that process, has shifted its activities mostly online. Contractors report monthslong delays in renewing licenses, putting them at risk of liability for working without a valid license…One contractor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared putting his license at risk, said that after he finally managed to make an appointment online, the MHIC employee was late in arriving for it and wouldn’t let the contractor into the building, making him wait in the lobby while the employee took the application upstairs.