For the past year, the generally bureaucratic and anodyne culture of the State Department has been replaced by the tropes of the Trump White House—gossip, infighting, and the sort of muzzled whispers one expects within the halls of Fieldston rather than Foggy Bottom. Demoralized by the disastrous reign of the enigmatic Rex Tillerson, Washington’s diplomatic corps was initially optimistic about the arrival of Mike Pompeo, a gregarious Trump loyalist and Koch network vet, as his successor. Despite concerns about Pompeo’s martial background, civil servants allowed themselves to hope that the new secretary’s rapport with Donald Trump would revitalize a department that Tillerson had allowed to molder. Meanwhile, the former C.I.A. director said all the right things—he promised to lift Tillerson’s hiring freeze, reopen communications between the top brass and staff, and make American diplomacy great again. People were so “beaten and mistreated” by Tillerson and his small circle of lieutenants, a current State official told me, that “any semblance” of positive change was cautiously welcomed.

Two months into his tenure, however, there is a growing fear that Pompeo has repaired the relationship between secretary of state and the president at the expense of the State Department itself. Within the reinforced-concrete walls of the Harry S. Truman Building, insiders say, Pompeo has made superficial changes that have improved morale. “People are certainly more pleased with Pompeo than they were with Tillerson,” a current administration staffer with knowledge of the dynamic told me. But “it really hasn’t trickled down too much below his level.” The hiring freeze wasn’t repealed, but merely rolled back, capping employment at December 2017 levels, and ensuring that the department remains understaffed. Fifty-four top positions requiring Senate confirmation still lack nominees, leaving State without ambassadors in Australia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, among others. (The State Department says it plans to hire 454 new employees above end of year 2017 levels.) Before he was confirmed, Pompeo reached out to high-ranking diplomats that left under Tillerson, offering them their jobs back, and in his first month announced that he was lifting the hiring freeze and held a town hall—the latter of which Tillerson did not do until his third month on the job. Now, staffers wonder whether the restoration of the department, and the paeans to nonpartisanship, were oversold. “Pompeo, I mean—he’s a politician,” said a former State Department official who is still in touch with former colleagues. “He saw the most obvious, obvious, obvious signal that he needed to do more to show that he wasn’t going to be totally antagonistic with the career bureaucracy.”

Behind the scenes, however, Pompeo is quietly overseeing the Trumpification of the State Department. Instead of using his clout in the West Wing to depoliticize the agency, whose budget Trump had threatened to cut, Pompeo has presided over an ideological crackdown on civil servants. Staffers are paralyzed, the current administration staffer told me, “nervous about not knowing how far they can go, not wanting to push the envelope, not wanting to get ahead of the Seventh Floor.” Mari Stull, a senior adviser within the Bureau of International Organization Affairs who used to blog about wine under the pseudonym “Vino Vixen,” has reportedly led the charge, probing the social-media pages of State employees to determine whether their personal politics are at odds with Trump. “The temperature has been ratcheted way up,” said one source I spoke with. Another suggested that political appointees like Stull had “been checking people out under the radar,” leaving staffers wary of publicizing their political beliefs. “I wouldn’t want to be a State Department employee with a public Twitter feed that is at all commenting on the state of politics in the country,” this person told me.

“It has really sent chills through people ... They are using diplomatic security to try to, quite frankly, intimidate people.”

The State Department has said it takes these claims seriously, and that “political retribution of any kind will not be tolerated.” Sources I spoke to, however, described a new culture of fear. In recent weeks, there have been reports of increased security measures, interpreted as efforts to silence would-be leakers. “It has really sent chills through people,” Brett Bruen, a former foreign-service officer still in touch with current State Department staffers, told me. “This is what is really concerning: they are using diplomatic security to try to, quite frankly, intimidate people. And so it is not just discover the leakers, it is: let’s use the guys with guns to make others afraid of possibly leaking.” (The State Department spokesperson called these allegations “unfounded.”)

Democrats on Capitol Hill are outraged. “It is not just that this isn’t how civil servants should be treated—it is illegal. It is a violation of law to have a political litmus test for the career civil servant,” a congressional staffer told me. “Looking at people’s social media and looking at their private posts as a test—if people are doing things or posting things that are critical of what the administration does, it is still illegal.” But it’s not the first time the State Department has been accused of punishing dissent. Last year, Brian Hook, who played a critical role in setting policy under Tillerson, was revealed to have compiled a list questioning employees’ loyalties and repeatedly exchanged misinformation with White House officials about State Department staffers. (One e-mail reportedly labeled suspect staffers with epithets like “leaker and troublemaker” and “turncoat.”) In January, a group of State Department employees who had worked for previous administrations hired attorneys after they were allegedly given inappropriately low-level work as “political retribution.” (The State Department previously described the assignments as temporary.)