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This morning, I listened to a conversation between our Uber driver and my husband. Our driver, a small business owner who said he drove early in the mornings, apparently figured out we were like-minded when it came to Elon Musk. He and my husband traded a couple of comments about how corrupt it is that Elon Musk-owned Starlink is in line to get government contracts with the Federal Aviation Associations (FAA). The AP reported that Starlink is preparing to take over a $2 billion contract currently held by telecom provider Verizon.

This is how the conversation went:

• It’s really horrible.

• It’s not how good your product is, it’s who you know.

• This will make air traffic less safe.

• There’s nothing we can do about it.

At that point, as you can probably guess, I jumped in. It was 5 a.m., and I’m not a morning person, but I couldn’t let the opportunity pass to encourage them to reframe the conversation to acknowledge the profound corruption involved here and their ability to educate people about it and to demand their members of Congress not sit back and watch this happen.

What’s happening with Starlink is a clear conflict of interest. Musk is spearheading the DOGE effort to cut contracts and employees, and it’s pure self-dealing to hand out billions to himself like this. It goes to the heart of why Musk has this fuzzy, quasi-government employee status. If he really were an employee, he’d face the same ethics standards and conflict of interest disclosure requirements all other federal employees are obligated to abide by. He wouldn’t be permitted to do much of the “work” he is doing. The FAA regulates SpaceX—what better way to remain in his good graces than to offer such a handsome payment.

Imagine this hypothetical for comparison: The Inspector General for the Department of Agriculture is involved in a massive overhaul of departmental programs, deciding what contracts will be maintained, what work the agency can continue to do, and who among its employees will be fired. It just so happens that on the side, he runs a fertilizer business, and he wants to get a contract with the Department of Agriculture to use his product and increase his revenues by millions of dollars. It’s understood that if the Inspector General gets the contracts, his enforcement will be less vigorous and the people who make sure he gets the contract will come out with a clean bill of health.

It is a nonsensical hypothetical, because it could not happen. Before taking the Inspector General job, our hypothetical government servant would have had to cure the conflict of interest so there wouldn’t be even the potential for this kind of public corruption. And that’s the problem here. The situation is outrageous.

Musk’s role with DOGE—whatever it is—is a betrayal of the public trust and likely the law. The Trump administration has gone to a lot of trouble to try and keep his responsibilities opaque, but it’s clear that if he’s not the head of DOGE in name, he’s running the show. A person doing that shouldn’t be in the position to receive government contracts. If our hypothetical happened in real life, the Inspector General and his friends within the Department would find themselves the subject of a federal criminal investigation.

So, don’t accept what’s going on here. Don’t stay quiet. You may not be able to change what’s happening all by yourself, but with all of our voices combined, a groundswell of outrage, like the one that kept Matt Gaetz from becoming the Attorney General of the United States, progress is possible. The one thing that’s certain is that if we just shrug our shoulders, Trump continues to grow the kleptocracy.

I hear from so many of you every day who understand that now is the time for us to be active. You are calling and writing your elected officials, protesting, educating yourselves. Let’s keep doing that and continue to exercise and strengthen our democracy muscles. Read the Constitution. Have a talk with a stranger about DOGE. Volunteer at a food bank. Be kind to people. Whatever you do, don’t do nothing. Don’t just throw your hands up in the air and assume Trump gets away with it all. We are still a rule of law country. Insist on it. Practice democracy.

Lawyers talk about “the practice” of law. We say we are practicing, because we are constantly learning more and developing our skills. Sometimes, we get it wrong. We learn. We continue to practice. Let’s think about democracy in that same way, that we practice it together as American citizens. We can learn from our mistakes, pick ourselves up, and get back to work. But what we cannot do is give up.

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I really appreciate that you’re here with me at Civil Discourse. As Americans, we’re all trying to answer the question, “What can we do to save our democracy?” right now. I try to address that question in different ways every time I write to you, whether it’s by keeping you informed or with specific suggestions. And the archive of older posts is available to paid subscribers, so you can go back and read through them when you need a little inspiration. Again, thank you all for your support. More than 550,000 people subscribe to Civil Discourse, and that number grows every day.

We’re in this together,

Joyce