What needs to be done is find out "Who" created the "Federation", "When" was it created, "Where" did the "Funds" come from to create it, and "How" did this guy become a spokesman for it!
Get those answers and you'll discover why an apologist is out there playing the "we're so guilty and we'll throw the bum out" game!
As everyone recalls there was this group called the National Association of Evangelicals. It hardly merited the description "association" ~ more like "lobbying office in DC" ~ a "service operation", not at all something providing leadership to hard core Protestant groups that'd signed up for it's membership.
Ted Haggard became the main guru of the NAE. He eventually fell out of favor due to his involvement with homosexuality and methamphetamine.
The NAE still exists, still provides brochures and phone numbers, and hardly constitutes a Protestant Vatican ~ which it never did even if Ted thought it was headed that way.
Something like the alleged "federation" in the new and booming "TEA Party" milieu probably has little more funding than modest annual dues from various TEA Party groups who want in on the brochures and maybe a piece of a lobbyist.
The greater part of the TEA Party operation is such that most of the funding, and expense, is generated by the local entities ~ rents paid for lecture halls, telephone bills, travel by local leaders, etc.
There's a cottage industry on the Left who want everybody to look at the Koch family as a major source of funding for the entire movement. Their theory is that local groups simply cannot and will not generate the funds necessary to set up a central office in DC so it takes some rich guy every single time ~ just like with the Democrats, particularly with their far leftwing affiliates who depended on checks from the USSR's politboro or dividends from Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme!
Now the Koch family may or may not make contributions, but the way the TEA Party has been working it looks to be locally financed, and, to tell the truth, run on the cheap side ~ they ain't wastin' money!