But she has not yet opened an office in her own New York City district — a delay that may give a sense of her priorities early in her tenure.

During an appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” on Monday, she blamed the government shutdown.

“There’s a lot of things we can’t do as freshmen members,” she told Colbert as they ate spoonfuls of ice cream. “We can’t properly set up our district offices. We can’t get laptops delivered. We can’t start doing the work that we were elected here to do.”

“It takes the green stuff,” she said. “And those workers are furloughed.”

But the shutdown has not had a similar effect on other first-term Congress members from New York State.

Of the four who took office Jan. 3, Ocasio-Cortez is the only one who has yet to open a district office. (A fifth freshman, Rep. Joseph Morelle, has also opened a local office, but he took office in November after a special election and therefore had more time.)

“We haven’t really run into any issues via the shutdown,” said Jonas Edwards-Jenks, a spokesman for Max Rose, a Democratic representative from Staten Island. Rose unseated a Republican incumbent, Dan Donovan, and moved into Donovan’s former district office. “We took that office over and were able to have that open on Day 1,” Edwards-Jenks said.

The shutdown did not stop Rep. Antonio Delgado from opening his first local office in Kingston, New York, within two weeks of taking office. Nor did it stop Anthony Brindisi, a freshman representative in upstate New York, from opening two offices.

“No issues due to the shutdown,” said Macey Matthews, a spokeswoman for Brindisi. “Our Binghamton office opened on Jan. 3, and our Utica office officially opened yesterday,” she said in an email last week.

District offices often function as one-stop service centers for constituents, and in Ocasio-Cortez’s district, the congresswoman’s staff would have been able to have helped with imminent problems like deportation and more mundane concerns like airplane noise from nearby LaGuardia Airport.

Instead, Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter on Tuesday that constituents have been redirected to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s office since “prior to our swearing-in,” and that she was thankful for “continued assistance” from the senator’s office.

For Ocasio-Cortez, finding a balance between the unique national platform she has attained as a new member of Congress and the workaday realities of what members call “case work” back home has been on her mind since the start. Among the videos she posted during her first days in Washington at a so-called Congress camp after her victory last year is a poll in which she asked where her focus should be.

“Would you rather have a Congress member with an amazing local services office, or one that leads nationally on issues?” she queried her 1.9 million followers on Instagram — a number that is well more than twice the population of her district. The results strongly favored national issues.

Her district, New York’s 14th, includes sections of the Bronx and Queens and is among the most ethnically diverse in the country, a place where local and federal officials said they dealt daily with constituent concerns over immigration, Medicare, Social Security and veterans benefits among other issues. Joseph Crowley, the former Democratic power broker whom Ocasio-Cortez defeated in June, dealt with at least 370 constituent cases in his last full year, according to a Twitter post from his office at the time.

While Ocasio-Cortez blamed the shutdown for her delay in opening a district office, the General Services Administration, which helps with the setup of such offices, said those services were not affected by the shutdown. But General Services could not deliver office supplies — including laptop computers — to a district office that has not been opened.

Ocasio-Cortez’s decision not to take over Crowley’s Jackson Heights, Queens, office complicated her office setup. (He also had an office in the Bronx.)

“If you’re inheriting your predecessor’s offices, that can be relatively seamless,” said Bradford Fitch, the president of the Congressional Management Foundation, a nonprofit that helps lawmakers and their aides. “Opening up a new office has all of the challenges of opening up a new business, along with the red tape.” A month or two for a member changing offices would not be uncommon, Fitch said.

No new leases could be signed before Jan. 3, but the office could begin making arrangements, Fitch said. “I’m pretty sure that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was not going to be beat in a general election. So I’m sure they had more time to plan,” he said.

After receiving questions from The Times about the district office, Ocasio-Cortez used her official House Twitter account to explain that she did not take over Crowley’s office because the landlord had wanted to nearly double the rent. The landlord could not immediately be reached.

In recent days, Ocasio-Cortez has secured a space along 37th Avenue in Jackson Heights, about eight blocks away from Crowley’s old office. That office is not expected to open until at least March. Her website describes it as “under construction.”

In the meantime, her communications director Corbin Trent said, some of her staff were working out of the Bronx office of a newly elected state senator, Alessandra Biaggi.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.