Shouldn't public documents by the government use a free and libre font? In fact, the mentioned Public Sans developed by the US federal government seems to be a great option, as it actually distinguishes the lowercase l and the uppercase I, something that, ironically, all suggested sans-serif alternatives fail to do.

Public Sans seems like a good candidate for a new "web safe" font. Perhaps one new web safe font per twenty five years is not too much. From there, it can percolate to the word processor and pdfs, and finally: government standard for government workers who just want to open their word processor and get to work, where sourcing even a free font to meet standard is just a snag to annoy.

Times New Roman is available at no cost under the Microsoft Core Fonts for the Web. (Microsoft no longer distributes this, but the license allows redistribution and redistribution is popular). AFAIK, Apple explicitly licenses the fonts and most open source OS distributions have a package for these fonts.

It's not libre, but font copyright is weird anyway, and the federal government doesn't always need to follow copyright.

Further, Public Sans was developed by the US govt under the first Trump administration and appears to be an excellent font. That seems to be a wise choice against TNR or Calibri on multiple angles.

You would hope, but changing this font isn't about making anything better, it's that Calibre was apparently a DEI font and had to go. I can't imagine these people thinking highly of an open source (Oooh communism) font that's also designed with accessibility in mind.