When Nikki Haley was 13, she balanced the books for her parents’ small business. Now, as governor-elect, she faces a slightly more daunting task: plugging a billion-dollar hole in the state’s budget. But Haley said during a meeting in THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s offices this afternoon that she looks forward to the challenge. “I love the opportunity that brings” to bring about limited government, she said. “I want to go at every agency start at zero and say, ‘What do we have to have?'”
Haley has set up a budget task force to report to her in January, but she’s already placed a few items on the chopping block. They range from the symbolic–“We will have a bright and very hard staff, but we’ll all be answering our own phones. We won’t have a state house photographer, we’ll use students from the university.”–to the substantive: “I want to privatize the entire bus system. Half of the Department of Education is mechanics. I want to get rid of that. I want to go into every part of government and say, ‘What can the private sector be doing and what does the government not need to be doing?'”
