Back in the halcyon days of late January—before the Iowa caucuses melted down, before an ascendant Bernie Sanders was supplanted by a triumphant Joe Biden, back when Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar were viable candidates in their own right and not small parts of the Biden machine that sought to cruise its way to the convention—Tim O’Brien, senior adviser to Mike Bloomberg’s presidential campaign, came to the candidate’s South Austin headquarters to talk about the future.

O’Brien, a clear-eyed political thinker who spent most of his career as a journalist, explained to me that he saw Bloomberg’s path to the nomination running through Texas, and that its best chances of succeeding would come if you saw the delegates from the first four primary states split among a number of candidates. But he wasn’t worried about what it would mean if that didn’t happen—he and the campaign, he told me, where prepared for every possibility, including the one that exists right now.

“If Biden comes out of it as the clear leader, you’re going to see a lot of the party falling behind him, and that changes our calculus,” O’Brien said in the former taco-themed pop-up on South Congress, near St. Edwards University. “But, you know, for us—and we’ve said this a lot publicly now—we’re hiring people for a year. This office is going to be open till November. Everybody is being hired through the election.”

The campaign had indeed said that a lot publicly, but it still seemed worth confirming. Committing to people for nearly a year, even if your campaign is rejected by voters—especially at the salaries Bloomberg was paying even his lower-level field organizers—is unheard-of in politics, and for good reason: it would take one of the richest people on the planet to be able to afford that. Bloomberg, of course, is one of those people.

“You said everybody is?” I asked O’Brien.

“In every state. Every state. Full time. We’re paying twice as much as most campaigns pay for our team. And we’re signing them on for a year. This office is open for a year,” he stressed. “Because we’re building this big political machine that Mike wants to put at the service of the party, or ultimately whoever the nominee is. Because first and foremost he wants to see Trump beaten, and that’s really what informed his decision to jump in the race.”

On Monday morning, via a conference call, the Bloomberg campaign announced that it would be taking back its public and private commitments to that team. Staff at the South Congress field office, like all of Bloomberg’s offices in Texas, were told they could keep the shiny new MacBooks and iPhones they received when they took the job, and that they’d be paid through the end of March—but their jobs with Bloomberg were over, most of them effective immediately. (Some were asked to stay on for a few more days to wrap up administrative loose ends.) If they wanted to try to continue on with Bloomberg’s efforts to see Trump beaten in the fall, they were invited to apply for jobs in the states that the campaign says it’ll be focusing its efforts on.

Back in January, O’Brien said there were going to be seven such states. “Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, North Carolina, Texas, and Florida,” he told me. “Those are the states where we think the juice is going to be in 2020. We’re very optimistic that we can turn Texas blue this year. There’s a lot of momentum behind that. Texas is such a huge and pivotal state that it would have a seismic impact around everything.”

O’Brien didn’t immediately return a call to explain what changed, in terms of Texas’s role, between late January and the conference call on March 9. When I asked the Bloomberg campaign whether fired staffers would be given priority in hiring in the states that apparently do still have “juice,” I received a statement, attributable to “a campaign spokesperson.”