"Nineteen ninety-nine," recalls longtime Democratic Texas House member Garnet Coleman. "That was the year Maximus started handling enrollment for Medicaid and CHIP [Children's Health Insurance Program] here. At the same time as Bush was pushing all this corporate privatization, he started his faith-based initiative, moving state money into these churches and evangelical groups to handle drug treatment and children's homes. It was a disaster." Even then, Coleman adds, "it was clear to me the goal was--and is--to cut back social services and cut it to their friends to make a shitload of money."

When Bush slid into the presidency, Goldsmith, himself a Bush donor on the "Pioneer" level, left the Maximus board to assist Bush's transition team, where he was put in charge of setting up the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Bush tapped Tommy Thompson, who as governor of Wisconsin had hired Maximus to run one of his state's welfare privatization programs, to serve as HHS secretary. More important for Ruddy's antiabortion, abstinence-only agenda were the strategic HHS appointments of Claude Allen as deputy secretary and Wade Horn as assistant secretary for the Administration for Children and Families (ACF). Horn, as head of the National Fatherhood Initiative, had worked with Maximus; Allen, after rising to White House domestic policy adviser and then resigning, charged with theft, joined the Gerard staff.

Ruddy's ties at HHS were further strengthened when Horn brought in another National Fatherhood Initiative staffer, Jeffrey Trimbath, to head ACF's abstinence-only education program--and when one of Ruddy's project directors at Maximus, Grant Collins, was hired at HHS to oversee welfare contracts. These ties would prove lucrative in the coming years, not only in padding Maximus's bottom line but also in pushing Ruddy's right-wing religious agenda.

Ruddy's new coziness with HHS was on display in February 2006 at a conference of abstinence-only federal grantees in Arlington, Virginia, hosted by Trimbath. Horn delivered the keynote; Collins and his old boss at Maximus, Ruddy, led workshops. But these ties had been paying off for years. When Bush took office, Maximus had just over $13 million in federal contracts. Within a year the amount tripled. By 2006 Maximus was doing $61 million in business with the Bush Administration.

Over the past five years Ruddy has also spent nearly $1 million to make sure the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress were primed to fund his select network of "family values" projects. In 2002 Ruddy called on former Republican National Committee chair Haley Barbour at the offices of his lobbying powerhouse, Barbour Griffith & Rogers, tasking his team to seek "increased funding for abstinence-only education programs." Over the next four years Ruddy personally paid BG&R $720,000 to lobby HHS, the President and Congress. A year into BG&R's lucrative contract, the firm recruited Tommy Thompson's chief of staff, Robert Wood, to join the team on the Ruddy account. According to filings with Congress, Wood then worked his former colleagues on "federal welfare reform legislation," "federal funding for specific projects" (likely abstinence education programs) and "issues involving [the] President's global AIDS initiative." BG&R added Maximus to its client roster in 2005.

Ruddy also hired the Stanton Park Group, a lobbying outfit run by James "J.D." Derderian--a member, with Goldsmith, of the Bush transition team. Derderian was connected with Wade Horn, too, as they had served together on the board of directors of the Institute for Youth Development, one of several abstinence-only groups on Gerard's grantee list. Together, milking their inside connections, BG&R and Derderian saw to it that millions of federal dollars went to Ruddy's network of abstinence-only outfits and antiabortion crisis pregnancy centers.

As always, Ruddy returned the favor, putting his connections and financial muscle behind a Republican Party that was increasingly aligned with his ideological interests. In 2004 Ruddy began to mobilize his network of grantees for the coming elections, doing his part to implement Karl Rove's strategy of picking up 4 million evangelicals who had not gone to the polls in 2000. To achieve this, the Bush campaign created its own grassroots network among evangelical churches and religious-right nonprofits. Ruddy hired the Family Research Council's Donovan to put word out through antiabortion newsletters, promising Gerard grants to conservative charities that would develop ambitious voter registration drives.

That year Ruddy also shoveled nearly $400,000 into James Dobson's Focus on the Family, which was then mounting anti-gay marriage campaigns in service of Republican candidates through its 501(c)4 arm. Ruddy put $172,000 into Redeem the Vote, a voter registration operation out of Montgomery, Alabama, targeting evangelical youth, and $117,916 into Life, Liberty and Family, an old antiabortion nonprofit. The latter donation went into a hardball anti-Kerry campaign, Your Catholic Voice, which attacked the Massachusetts Democrat for his prochoice politics in newspaper ads that ran across the country. He also maxed out his personal contribution to the Bush/Cheney ticket ($4,000) and spread more than $12,000 to the campaigns of select religious-right Republicans running for Congress, including Tom Coburn in Oklahoma and Billy Tauzin in Louisiana. For the 2006 midterms, Ruddy put hundreds of thousands into Common Sense Ohio, a Republican 527 that ran deceptive ads and conducted push-polling in seven states.

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