Even before Donald Trump won the Republican presidential primary on a shoestring budget, the billionaire has been an innovator when it comes to his finances. The real-estate mogul, who has declared bankruptcy four times, has a long history of refusing to pay contractors, lawyers, and employees who work for him if he finds their work unsatisfactory. So it is perhaps unsurprising that several members of Trump’s neglected policy shop in Washington, D.C., quit last month when they found themselves the latest victims of the candidate’s unorthodox budgetary discipline.

Most of the people working at the campaign’s Beltway outpost walked out the door in August when the paychecks they say they were promised never arrived, according to a new report by The Washington Post. “It’s a complete disaster,” one former adviser told the Post. “They use and abuse people. The policy office fell apart in August when the promised checks weren’t delivered.”

The Alexandria-based policy shop reportedly launched in April to help expand Trump’s messaging beyond soundbites like build a wall, take the oil, and repeal Obamacare. But the organization’s work went largely ignored by the candidate, who never acknowledged the advisors in press releases. More dispiriting than the lack of attention was the lack of a paycheck. Staffers were promised compensation by Corey Lewandowski when he was managing the Trump campaign, several former advisers told the Post. But when Lewandowski’s reign atop Trump Tower came to a sudden end, their agreement became another casualty of the campaign shake-up. “It was understood that we would be paid. The campaign never discussed how much the pay would be. It was never in writing,” one staffer said. “There were some people who were treating it as a full-time job. I suspect that those people were quite astonished when the pay didn’t come through.”

Funding for the policy shop dried up under campaign chair Paul Manafort, who effectively ousted Lewandowski. And while the leaders of the campaign’s Alexandria team repeatedly appealed to Trump Tower for funding, they were consistently denied. According to the Post’s reporting, the campaign apparently saw little need for policy advisers once Trump secured the Republican nomination. Several of the high-profile experts and advisers on the current volunteer policy team have reportedly never even met Trump. Although the policy shop reportedly held “two marathon work sessions” to help Trump get ready for the upcoming presidential debates, and planned to send advisers to New York to brief the candidate on specific issues on a daily basis, the effort was for naught. “The New York office realized that their candidate would not be receptive to that level of intense preparation,” one advisor told the Post.