Nikki Haley discusses 2024, foreign policy, and weaponization of government.

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley discusses foreign policy and more

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 United Nations and South Carolina governor was scheduled to conduct a town hall on June 27, but it was postponed until July 6.

The Epoch Times had the opportunity to sit down with Haley for an engaging interview at the cookout, which took place at a private residence.

The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Q: What would your Day One agenda look like?

A: 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 rags, 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.

Q: How would you fix the FBI and Department of Justice?

A: I think that, first of all, you have to understand that they have 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.

Q: Do you support impeaching President Joe Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Wray?

A: 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.

Q: How would you fix the health care and health insurance issues in the country?

A: 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’s 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.

Q: You’ve called for entitlement reform for younger generations. What would the new retirement age be?

A: 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.

Q: What are your plans for tax cuts?

A: 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, 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.

Q: How do you plan to compromise with Democrats while keeping your promises?

A: When you have a national purpose and you tell the country where you want to go, that’s going to be key. The key is not to start by 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 to