The New York Times recently ran a story on Alex Adams, President Donald Trump’s pick to run the Administration for Families and Children (ACF). Adams, who used to oversee Idaho’s Department of Health and Welfare, has reportedly suggested he wants federal childcare regulations to “fit on an index card in my back pocket” and is preparing to “barbecue a lot of sacred cows.” Based on Adams’ tenure in Idaho, one of those cows he may set his sights on — and perhaps the most dangerous to kill — is the idea of maximum child-to-adult ratios in childcare settings.

Child-to-adult ratios cap the number of children a single caregiver can supervise. The numbers shift by age — for instance, while these vary by state, a common ratio is six two-year-olds per adult. Intuitively, this makes sense: while most providers have no desire to cram thirty little kids into one room, there’s good reason to prevent someone from doing just that to hike up revenue — a real situation investigators uncovered in 2019 in, you guessed it, Idaho.

That deregulatory attitude is strong in Idaho. In 2025, despite ongoing safety concerns, a state legislator proposed HB-243, which would have entirely eliminated state-mandated ratios and overridden localities’ authority to set ratio standards stricter than the state’s. Instead, providers could set their own ratio, so long as they alone deemed it reasonable. Proponents of the bill reasoned that parents wouldn’t choose the thirty-kids-per-adult program, suggesting that the market would sort out any safety concerns. But in a deeply supply-constrained childcare system where many are forced to choose between a suboptimal (cheap, convenient) program or failing to pay bills, this is asking for trouble, if not tragedy.

Idaho’s proposed ratio elimination was only blocked after a state senate hearing where the uncle of an eleven-week-old boy who had died in an out-of-ratio program gave emotional testimony. “An investigation into this tragic incident found the child-to-staff ratio exceeded the current limits set by Idaho law and the daycare provider was negligent in not following safe sleeping practices and supervision requirements,” the man stated. He added that “HB-243 is attempting to repeal current child-to-staff ratios and reduce supervision requirements, both of which, if properly followed, may have prevented the death of my nephew Logan.” Indeed, had HB-243 passed as written, neither the program in which Logan died nor the thirty-kids-with-one-adult program would have been out of compliance, so the state wouldn’t have been in a place to intervene.

While Adams did not publicly lobby for HB-243, his fingerprints were all over it. In 2024, he authorized a waiver of existing ratios, allowing ratios for every age group except infants to be boosted by one child. The rationale he laid out in a departmental memo is revealing. Adams wrote, “While data is mixed, there does not appear to be definitive data supporting one child-staff ratio over another, though it is logical that smaller ratios can be beneficial for certain quality-related outcomes and may even be preferred by parents.” He concluded, “Parents may judge the pros and cons of various facilities that are state licensed and make decisions in the best interest of their family judging cost and quality.”

This logic, of course, would recommend a world where the government steps back almost entirely from providing consumer protections. Why have health and safety requirements for restaurants, like requiring employees to wash their hands or to keep the kitchen rat-free? Surely diners will judge the pros and cons of various facilities and make decisions in their best interest. Given this general attitude, it’s no surprise that the Times reported that Adams, now acting in his federal capacity, is eyeing Head Start, the federally funded program over which ACF has the most direct control. Adams apparently “intends to loosen or eliminate the rules that limit how many children can be supervised by each [Head Start] teacher.”

After all this, it’s instructive to look at how Idaho’s childcare system is doing, given that it already had one of the loosest ratio requirements in the country before Adams helped loosen it further. The answer? Not great. In a 2025 report titled “Rising cost of child care affects Idaho’s labor market,” the Idaho Department of Labor noted that there has been a net loss of childcare programs in the state over recent years at the same time that fees are rising and parents are being forced to leave their jobs. The problem, as it turns out, is not ratios; the problem remains a lack of public funding in a pay-to-play system with enormously high fixed costs, where childcare is treated as a crude commodity rather than a universal public good.

Adams is accurate on one point: there is no magic ratio when it comes to childcare. Child development is a very tricky thing to study with any granularity given the myriad influences involved and young children’s diverse trajectories; no researcher can declare that a ratio for two-year-olds of six-to-one is unquestionably better than a ratio of seven-to-one or five-to-one. But the existing recommendations reflect experts’ best conclusions, and what we can confidently say is that the presence of a reasonable upper bound is a necessary measure — both to ensure health, safety, and quality and to prevent a follow-the-leader effect where programs feel coerced into increasing their ratios to remain competitive.

If Adams really cared about childcare affordability and access, he’d be telling his boss to open the public coffers instead of proclaiming childcare too expensive for a federal government that’s busy waging war.