The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) has added three new leaders to the team in the new year, including a veteran legislator from the home state of the agency’s top official, Alex Adams.
Adams, who was confirmed in late 2025, tapped seven-term Idaho legislator Wendy Horman to lead ACF’s Office of Child Care, which primarily manages the Child Care and Development Block Grant. Appropriated at $12.3 billion in fiscal 2025, the fund is matched with state dollars and assists low-income families in affording care that for many is a critical employment support.
Horman, a mother of five who served as a local school board trustee for more than a decade, made education a focal point of her career in the Idaho Legislature, and was among the state’s most ardent champions of school choice measures. Last year she prevailed, securing a $50 million tax credit for parents sending their children to private schools.
She resigned to take this job with the Trump administration in December. She exits Idaho politics just as the state Legislature and Gov. Brad Little begin to reckon in earnest with a $555 million projected budget shortfall that has already prompted a 3% cut to the state’s child welfare agency, which was led by Adams for a year before he joined the administration. Future cuts have already been approved this year.
Normally the Office of Child Care is well out of the limelight, but Horman inherits a high-profile controversy. Days after she accepted the job, the Trump administration froze $10 billion in child care and child welfare funds for California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York.
Kim Parker has been appointed to lead the Family and Youth Services Bureau, which oversees federal funding for runaway and homeless youth services, as well as sexual health, education and teen pregnancy prevention programs. Parker is a career social worker who spent the past six years leading theAssociation of Christians in Health and Human Service and serving as a professor at Indiana Wesleyan University.
Parker arrived in America as a refugee after the Vietnam War in 1979, sponsored by a Christian church. She authored East Meets West: Parenting from the Best of Both Worlds in 2016.
Finally, joining the administration to lead the Administration for Native Americans is Kim Kovol, the former head of Alaska’s child welfare agency. She takes over a relatively small corner of ACF that administers social and economic development grants in Native communities, as well as efforts to preserve Native language learning.
Kovol is not Native American. She moved to Alaska 30 years ago, and in 2022 became the first commissioner of the state’s newly constituted Department of Family and Community Services in 2022, after serving as a special assistant to Gov. Mike Dunleavy on social services.