Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley was in New Hampshire on June 28, taking part in a foreign policy discussion and New Hampshire GOP cookout featuring Gov. Chris Sununu. The former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and South Carolina governor was scheduled to conduct a town hall on June 27, but it was postponed until July 6.
The Epoch Times sat down with Ms. Haley for a wide-ranging interview at the cookout, which was at a private residence.
The Epoch Times: What would your Day One agenda look like?
Ms. Haley: First thing is you control what you can control first, and that’s your agencies. You go and relieve and replace every head of every agency because you want to make sure you’re putting people that understand their consumer. They understand who they’re serving, the challenges that they have, and the opportunities [that] could be there.
The second thing is you go and you make sure that—I did this as governor—you send people into every agency to clean it up, pull down old regs, pull down old programs, get rid of any problem children so that you can get it used to working again. And then you give each agency goals that, in the first 90 days, they have to accomplish so that they can start showing that they’re working for the people and not the other way around.
Only then do you start thinking of legislation. The first thing I would do is focus on our agencies.
The Epoch Times: The FBI and Department of Justice have come under fire for being weaponized. How would you fix this? Would you fire FBI Director Chris Wray?
Ms. Haley: I think that, first of all, you have to understand that they’ve lost all trust with the American people. And we have to go build that trust back. We can’t build that trust back if Christopher Wray is the head of the FBI. But it’s not just Chris Wray. You’ve got to get rid of all that senior management out there too. We’ve got to go and make an example of people. We’ve got to go and show that we’re truly cleaning it up if we’re going to take care of it.
The Epoch Times: Do you support impeaching President Joe Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Wray?
Ms. Haley: First of all, Biden, I think that he’s got a lot to answer for. The fact that he hasn’t done a press conference to acknowledge all the Hunter Biden stuff is irresponsible at best, and he needs to answer that, but it smells bad.
And so, yes, I think that—I think Congress should be investigating. If the DOJ won’t do it, I think Congress should, and I think Congress should open up an investigation on Biden and find out exactly what was taken; what was done in return, if anything; and how much Biden knew.
In terms of Merrick Garland, I mean, look—it got weaponized under his watch, so he’s got some serious questions to answer as well, and I think they need to do an investigation on him.
Christopher Wray needs to answer the same questions, all of these people.
The American people don’t trust what they’ve done. They all owe it to answer as many questions as possible to let us know how we got to this point, and there’s got to be accountability. We can’t just let this go.
The Epoch Times: How would you fix the health care and health insurance issues in the country? Would you repeal and replace Obamacare?
Ms. Haley: When it comes to health care, I think we have to look at the fact that we have to literally break our health care system. And when I say that, we have to make it all transparent. Open it all up, from the hospitals to the doctors to the pharmaceutical companies to the insurance companies, and make them all show what they do. If we just dealt with the insurance companies alone, we would cut health care in half.
But if we make that transparent and if we start getting out the middlemen—whether it’s the [pharmacy benefit managers] or whether it’s the insurance companies—and we start letting the patient actually work with their service provider, that’s the first step.
The second thing is service providers need to focus on value-based health care, where they’re focused on outcomes, on prevention and outcomes. So we need to do those things.
And I think that we need to have insurance companies and medical care where you have options, where every patient can decide the type of care they want, what they want, and do it based on their—based on what their options are.
In terms of Obamacare, I mean, it’s hard to see that it has fixed anything. All that it has done is run the cost of health care up. But I do think we want to make sure that every person in America has access to health care, without question. So we’ve got to go look at that, but the way you go and read the price of health care and increase the quality of health care is to make it transparent, so we can open the whole thing up so that patients are suddenly in charge and not, you know, hospitals and insurance companies.
The Epoch Times: Just to clarify, you would repeal and replace Obamacare?
Ms. Haley: I think we have to have a solution before we do that. But I do think, yes, we need to see that it didn’t work the way we wanted it to.
The Epoch Times: You’ve called for entitlement reform for younger generations. What would the new retirement age be?
Ms. Haley: We have to go back and do the math. I’m an accountant. You’ve got to go do the math. You’ve got to go look and see. But if we started with those in their 20s and younger coming in, raise the retirement age to life expectancy, and go see what those calculations are, they know they’re not going to get it anyway.
So we have to start doing that, and I think it should reflect life expectancy. If you’re looking at what retirement age [is], it can’t be where it is now. It needs to be more reflective of what we see with life expectancy.
The Epoch Times: The individual tax cuts enacted by President Trump are set to expire in 2025. Would you try to make them permanent as president or would you cut taxes further and make those permanent and eliminate more or all loopholes?
Ms. Haley: There’s too much spending, there’s too much borrowing.
First of all, yes, on the tax cuts. I think that when we saw the Trump tax cuts go into play, we saw a lot of people have more money in their wallets. They started spending it and helped the economy. We need to look to simplify the tax code in any way that we can. There’s not any person in America that thinks the tax code is fair right now. So if we’re going to do it, it’s not just about cuts. It’s about how can we make sure that we’re handling the way we tax smarter so that more people have money to invest.
The Epoch Times: Unless you have 60 Republicans in the Senate, you'll have to compromise with Democrats. How do you plan to do so while keeping your promises? For example, cutting spending and not adding to the national debt?
Ms. Haley: When you have a national purpose and you tell the country where you want to go, that’s going to be key. The key isn’t to start with something that’s incredibly divisive. Let’s show what it’s like when they win together. Let’s show when we win together on transparency in education, let’s show when we win together on cutting spending. Let’s show when we win together on getting rid of earmarks or reducing crime or doing something with the border, I think, or taking on China.
There are things we can work on that I think we can show them what it’s like to win. But we shouldn’t go into it with a sense of fighting. We should go into it with the fact that we owe the American people some results, and they need to know that the government’s working for them.
The Epoch Times: You recently unveiled your energy plan. Would you resume the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and withdraw the United States again from the Paris Climate Agreement?
Ms. Haley: Yes and yes.
The Epoch Times: How do you plan to combat “wokeism” in America’s public schools? Nationwide school choice?
Ms. Haley: We have to go back to the basics. I mean, you look at the fact that—what, last week or this week—it came out 13-year-olds had the lowest grades in reading and math in decades. Before COVID, 67 percent of eighth graders weren’t proficient in reading or math. We don’t have time to deal with all of these distractions. We’ve got to go back to reading, writing, and math and get some vocational classes back at our high schools.
The Epoch Times: How do you plan to tackle student debt?
Ms. Haley: First of all, you don’t give a loan without telling the student what’s required with that loan.
Right now, it’s too easy to get a loan. If you’re going to have to sit there and fill out all this paperwork to close on a house, you should have to spend 15 minutes with that student to tell them exactly what’s involved in that loan, what they’re going to have to pay back and what the smart way is to do it. We need to start telling the students, on the front end and on the back end, why they’re going to do it.
The second thing is we need to start going back to tech schools and not so much on four-year universities. We’ve got to show kids that there are great jobs that they can do from a tech perspective, as opposed to just going to that four-year education and being further in debt.
The Epoch Times: You’ve decried Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for giving Disney special favors and have lamented government favors. And you’ve said no to earmarks. Speaking of government favoritism, Boeing, which has a strong presence in your home state, has been a recipient of the Export-Import Bank, an institution derided by critics for cronyism. As president, what would you do about the Export-Import Bank?
Ms. Haley: I think you have to look at the Export-Import Bank. The way that it’s handled now is to make sure that it’s competitive with other countries. That’s always been the case. What we do want to do is make sure, how do we go and get those companies on strong footing without having to pick favorites and pick winners and losers? Right now, the winners are the other countries. The losers aren’t us. So we’ve got to look at, we’ve got to figure out how we can do things that allow our companies to be competitive without making sure that we’re taking on too many subsidies and bailouts.
The Epoch Times: Would you formally recognize Taiwan’s independence from China?
Ms. Haley: Taiwan hasn’t recognized its independence from China. It hasn’t said it wants to be an independent country. So I’m for self-determination. They have to first decide what they want to do. And then we follow suit. We shouldn’t get in front of them on that.
The Epoch Times: Would you recognize Iraqi Kurdistan independence?
Ms. Haley: I think we have to be careful again there. You’ve got to first see what the situation is on the ground and decide what’s in our best interest for our national security and also for freedom.
The Epoch Times: From reportedly resuming nuclear talks with Iran to announcing that it'll no longer fund research in Israeli neighborhoods in Judea and Samaria—the West Bank—what’s your reaction been to the Biden administration as it pertains to Israel?
Ms. Haley: Total slap in the face to Israel to have done that. Biden has forgotten who his friends are. And he seems to be placating his enemies. That’s the problem, and that’s why he needs to go.
The Epoch Times: As governor, you
signed the first legislation to combat the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel. Would you do the same on the federal level?
Ms. Haley: Absolutely.
The Epoch Times: Additionally, what steps would you take to combat antisemitism?
Ms. Haley: First of all, in universities, you cut their funding if we don’t have every university actually dealing with racism and antisemitism. There should be no place for hate in our universities. There should be no place for hate in our way of life in America. And so we’ve got to start calling it out everywhere we see it and treat it like racism because it’s no different.
The Epoch Times: You’ve lamented that the GOP has lost seven of the eight past popular votes in the presidential election. However, isn’t it the electoral college that ultimately matters?
Ms. Haley: It is, but Republicans should want to win the majority of Americans. That’s something in our moral compass we should want to do. It’s not something to be proud about, that we don’t win the majority of Americans.
And so I think we have to make sure that we talk about the fact that our solutions lift up everybody, but it’s also the fact that we need to be a party of addition. We’ve got to bring in people that haven’t currently been in our party. And I think the only way you do that is to have a new generational leader that understands that it’s about addition and making sure we do more to earn the support of the majority of the country.
The Epoch Times: Throughout your career, you’ve pulled off upsets and proven your critics wrong when it comes to running for office, from state legislator to governor. How do you plan to continue this streak with your former boss staying resilient in the polls despite his indictments?
Ms. Haley: It’s early, and no one will outwork me. No one will outsmart me in this race.
We’re going to touch every hand. We’re going to answer every question. We’re going to do everything we need to in order to earn the support of the people. And at the end of the day, I know we'll be successful.
The Epoch Times: You have two dogs, Bentley and Rio. What would the White House rules be for them? No sitting or lying down on the Oval Office furniture?
Ms. Haley: No on the furniture. But yes, I would let them run around.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
