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The best analysis that I've seen of this latest consideration for the Fed to issue its own debt is over at Jesse's Café Américain: Is the Fed Taking the First Steps to Selective Default and Devaluation?.

Jesse writes:

We have been looking for an out-of-the-box move from the Fed, but this was not it.
The big kahuna move would be for the Treasury and the Fed to make an arrangement in which the Fed is able to purchase Treasury debt directly without subjecting it to an auction in the public market first. This is known as 'a money machine' and is prohibited by statute.
But as usual the Fed surprised us. They are asking Congress about permission to issue their own debt directly, not tied to Treasuries.
If the Fed were able to issue its own debt, which is currently limited to Federal Reserve Notes backed by Treasuries under the Federal Reserve Act, it would provide Bernanke the ability to present a different class of debt to the investing public and foreign central banks.
The question is whether it would be backed with the same force as Treasuries, or is subordinated, or superior.
There will not be any lack of new Treasury debt issuance upon which to base new Fed balance sheet expansion. The notion that there might be a debt generation lag out of Washington in comparison with what the Fed issues as currency is almost frightening in its hyperinflationary implications.
This makes little sense unless the Fed wishes to be able to set different rates for their debt, and make it a different class, and whore out the currency notes without impacting the sovereign debt itself to leave the door open for the issuance of a new Dollar.
What an image. The NY Fed as a GSE, the new Fannie and Freddie. Ben can simply print a new class of Federal Reserve Notes with no backing from Treasuries. BenBucks.
Perhaps we're missing something, but this looks like a step in anticipation of an eventual partial default or devaluation of US debt and the dollar.
You know what they say: When the going gets tough, the debt holders get screwed.

So, if I am reading Jesse correctly, he's wondering if perhaps this is leading toward the following:

Currently dollars are issued as payment for U.S. Treasury debt, which debt has its interest payments backed by the "full faith and credit of the United States", meaning backed by the tax revenue collected from Americans. In other words, while Dollars are no longer Gold backed, they aren't baseless fiat money either. Rather dollars are backed by Treasuries, which provide a reliable income stream of dividends, courtesy of the enforcement arm of the IRS tax collectors.
With this new proposal, more dollars could be issued that were not backed by Treasuries, but rather backed by these new "Ben Bonds", meaning apparently backed by the trillions of dollars "worth" of debt paper that the Fed has gathered on its balance sheet recently in various bailout efforts.
This could lead to trashing the Dollar, while not trashing as badly the credit rating of the United States.
Then perhaps a new currency could be issued, that (back to the good old days of ... er eh ... now) really was just backed by Treasury notes and American tax collections, rather than the discredited Dollar that had fallen to being only backed by the pile of debt ~~paper~~ crap on the Fed's balance sheet.