“This is bullshit,” a senior State Department official messaged on Thursday, shortly after the Trump administration announced that all United States diplomats and department employees were to return to work next week, despite an ongoing government shutdown that has deprived some 800,000 federal employees of a regular paycheck. Earlier that afternoon, Bill Todd, the deputy undersecretary for management, had sent out an urgent memo elucidating the rationale. “As a national security agency,” he wrote, “it is imperative that the Department of State carries out its mission.”

For staffers who were already frustrated with their newish, Trump-loving boss, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, being forced to work without pay has felt like a last straw. “It just further destroys morale . . . It demonstrates a continued lack of respect, even apparent enmity, for people committed to the national security of the country, only in order to serve a political calculation,” one current State Department staffer said. “It’s like, we’re supposed to show up and pretend like everything is cool? Work as normal?”

According to Todd’s memo, the State Department “is taking steps to make additional funds available to pay employee salaries”—at least for one pay period. But among diplomats I spoke with, the news did little to dampen the fury within the diplomatic ranks as the shutdown stretches into its fifth week. To begin with, the memo hardly lifted the cloud of financial uncertainty in Foggy Bottom and at U.S. embassies abroad. State Department employees won’t be paid for any work they have done since the government was officially shuttered at midnight on December 22 until after Congress and the president strike a deal. Around 42 percent of State Department employees in the U.S. and 26 percent of the workforce abroad were furloughed in December. And there is no guarantee that department employees will continue to get paid after the first set of paychecks are doled out on Valentine’s Day. “They are still holding the two pay periods hostage until the shutdown is over,” the State staffer told me, exasperated. “How are you supposed to feel good about it?”

Perhaps even more important than the paycheck, however, is what the shutdown has symbolized for America’s diplomatic corps. Current and former State staffers I spoke to were particularly upset by Pompeo’s decision to bring his wife, Susan, on his trip in the Middle East last week, even as some diplomats were filing for unemployment benefits or working unpaid overtime to manage the workload. “I don’t like it because no matter what you do, the wife needs staffing,” a former U.S. ambassador told me. “During a shutdown, it is just totally inappropriate.” (Pompeo defended the decision, saying Susan is a “force multiplier.”)

Pompeo also chose to move ahead with a conference for all U.S. chiefs of mission and U.S. ambassadors that started Wednesday, guaranteeing extra work for unpaid State Department staffers. During a senior staff meeting the previous Friday, they were told to bring in as many bodies as needed to put on the event, according to one source who estimated the number could be in the hundreds. (A State Department spokesperson defended not canceling the event in a statement to Politico.) Diplomats I spoke to said they recognize the value of a such an event. But as former foreign service officer Brett Bruen explained, “going ahead with this conference just rubs salt into the wounds” of State Department staffers who are going unpaid. “It is a good illustration of this issue that Pompeo is just out there with his own script of how rules should be applied whether it is during the shutdown and he gets to have this conference or whether it is his wife who gets to travel around and do these trips.”