Category Archives: EPA Environmental Protection Agency

POTUS Far From Lame Duck, Progressive ‘To-Do’ Items

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The arrogance of Barack Obama continues. Just a week ago, he declared he could win a third term if he ran again.

“I actually think I’m a pretty good President. I think if I ran, I could win. But I can’t,” Obama ad-libbed during a speech in Ethiopia. “There’s a lot that I’d like to do to keep America moving. But the law is the law, and no person is above the law, not even the president.”

So imagine how blindsided America is about to be from now until January 2017. What more is planned? Normalizing relations with Bashir al Assad? Normalizing relations with North Korea? Suspending Border Patrol operations completely? Federalizing all national banks? Imposing more agency regulations on Americans and business? Making all interstate roads toll roads?

Lack of imagination now could prevent you from being prepared. Consider other countries that don’t impose government tyrannical policies and have a better competing edge. Cutting military personnel to roving 4 day work weeks? Replacing Ruth Bader Gingsberg on the Supreme Court with Cass Sunstein? Bailing out the City of Chicago to the tune of $7 billion?

Let us start with what is coming almost immediately.

Obama’s big climate rule ready for Monday launch

Politico: Supporters say they plan to be at the White House for the announcement of an EPA rule that will take on power plants’ pollution.

President Barack Obama is poised to push ahead with the nation’s most ambitious environmental regulation in decades — a crackdown on power plants’ greenhouse gas emissions that the administration hopes will put the U.S. in striking distance of achieving a global agreement to combat climate change.

Environmentalists supporting the rule say they plan to be at the White House for a Monday afternoon announcement that they hope will feature the president himself, as part of what’s shaping up to be a major sales pitch both within and outside the administration. Allies including Virginia environmental groups, elected officials and green-minded business groups have also scheduled media calls for 3 p.m. Monday to react to the news.

The White House has not confirmed the timing of the announcement.

The regulation is expected to ease up on a few of the most controversial provisions that the Environmental Protection Agency included in its draft proposals in the past two years. But it will still set up a years-long legal and political battle with congressional Republicans and other opponents, who call it the major weapon in Obama’s “War on Coal,” and it promises to become a major point of contention for the 2016 presidential race.

The regulation also puts a capstone on Obama’s efforts to secure a legacy as the president who made a serious assault on global warming, without waiting for action from Congress — though he will have to depend on his successors to carry it through. States will also play a big role, with six governors so far indicating they won’t comply with EPA’s mandates.

Environmentalists, who have been pressing for Obama to announce the rule personally, call it a crucial first step in cutting the pollution that scientists blame for boosting the Earth’s temperatures and lifting sea levels. But they say far steeper cuts will still be needed if the world is to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

“This is a huge part of the president’s commitment to reducing greenhouse gases,” said Carol Browner, Obama’s first-term climate czar, who left the White House several months after the administration’s attempt at comprehensive climate legislation failed in 2010. “He has viewed the issue of climate change as something he has responsibility for under the law — the moral and ethical responsibility domestically, but also globally.”

Opponents vow that the rule will not stand. “We believe it’s legally deficient on a number of fronts and believe it’s going to have a terrible impact on citizens across the country,” said West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, one of several plaintiffs who won a Supreme Court victory this summer over an EPA mercury rule.

Future legal challenges against the climate rule are also likely to end up in front of the Supreme Court.

The broad strokes of the rule are expected to match the drafts that EPA has issued over the past two years: By 2030, existing power plants will have to put out an average of 30 percent less carbon dioxide than they did in 2005 — a goal the U.S. is about halfway to meeting. And the rule effectively bars the construction of new coal-fired power plants, the biggest source of carbon pollution in the U.S.

Together, the requirements would change the way the U.S. produces and uses electricity, continuing an ongoing wave of coal-plant shutdowns while offering legs up to natural gas, solar, wind and maybe nuclear.

For people closely following the rule, the major questions concern how much the final rule will differ from what EPA originally proposed in September 2013 and last June. Sources have said EPA will roll back an interim pollution-cutting deadline that states and power companies attacked as unworkable, to 2022 from 2020. The agency is also expected to abandon its proposal to require future coal-burning plants to capture and store their carbon pollution, an expensive mandate that opponents said would be vulnerable in court because it violates a 2005 energy law.

States are also expected to get an extra year to submit their compliance plans to EPA — 2018 instead of 2017.

Other potential changes could include making it easier for nuclear power plants and their carbon-free emissions to count toward meeting states’ cleanup targets, changing the way that energy-efficiency initiatives are included in calculating states’ reduction goals, and altering the way that EPA’s formulas treat green energy that is produced in one state but sold in another.

And EPA could tweak the complicated formulas that set widely varying cleanup targets for each state, which in last year’s draft ranged from cuts of 11 percent for North Dakota to 72 percent for Washington state. The raw numbers don’t necessarily reflect the degree of difficulty: Washington, for instance, could meet most of its goal by closing one coal plant that’s already scheduled for retirement, EPA has said.

The costs of the rule will be big — but so will the benefits, the administration contends. Last summer, EPA estimated that the portion dealing with existing power plants would bring $55 billion to $93 billion in economic benefits, compared with $7.3 billion to $8.8 billion in costs to the economy.

But EPA’s critics note that the rule comes amid troubling financial times for the coal industry, and might even arrive on the same day that a major coal producer — Virginia-based Alpha Natural Resources — is expected to file for bankruptcy protection. That follows several other high-profile coal company bankruptcy filings.

Environmental regulations like the carbon rule and a forthcoming Interior Department rule meant to protect Appalachian streams are only part of the reason coal has dropped from nearly 50 percent of the nation’s electricity in 2005 to 39 percent last year. Inexpensive natural gas, which burns more cleanly than coal does, has taken a greater share of the market. And in some regions, coal deposits are becoming increasingly more difficult and less economical to mine.

Meanwhile, Obama’s earlier attempts to tackle climate change have struggled too. The House passed a cap-and-trade bill in 2009, but it died in the Senate the following year despite the Democrats holding a large majority. The president also stumbled with an anticlimactic 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark. But he revived climate change as a theme late in his 2012 reelection campaign, declaring that “climate change is not a hoax,” and in his second inaugural address, in which he said failing to take on the threat “would betray our children and future generations.”

The credibility of those promises will be at stake in December, when negotiators the U.S. and other nations gather in Paris to try to reach a global climate agreement.

The final rule is also timed for maximum momentum to take advantage of the final year and a half of Obama’s time in office. Litigation over the rule is likely to last through this decade and potentially into the 2020s, making the winner of the 2016 presidential race a key figure in Obama’s climate legacy.

While it remains unclear just how far a Republican president could roll back the regulation, all sides agree a GOP White House would spell significant trouble for the carbon rule. The GOP field of 2016 candidates opposes the rule: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said it is “unworkable,” while former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has called it “irresponsible and ineffective.”

Meanwhile, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has pledged to protect the rule, while it garnered praise from rival Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders has called for even further climate action.

 

 

Hillary’s Team Denies Classified Emails

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As the probe continues on Hillary Clinton’s email history and her private server, one must question how a Secretary of State in four years never electronically interacted in classified communications.

If this is accurate when it comes to her private email server, then where did classified communications occur?

Hillary was a lawyer and so is Jeh Johnson, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and he too used a private email for official business and did the former Secretary of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, who also created an alias.

Clearly there is a real pattern in the Obama administration where abuse and waivers are the culture of corruption and obstruction of procedures and law. Imagine how many others use non official communications systems.

Criminal Inquiry Is Sought in Clinton Email Account

NYT’s

WASHINGTON — Two inspectors general have asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into whether sensitive government information was mishandled in connection with the personal email account Hillary Rodham Clinton used as secretary of state, senior government officials said Thursday.

The request follows an assessment in a June 29 memo by the inspectors general for the State Department and the intelligence agencies that Mrs. Clinton’s private account contained “hundreds of potentially classified emails.” The memo was written to Patrick F. Kennedy, the under secretary of state for management.

It is not clear if any of the information in the emails was marked as classified by the State Department when Mrs. Clinton sent or received them.

But since her use of a private email account for official State Department business was revealed in March, she has repeatedly said that she had no classified information on the account.

The Justice Department has not decided if it will open an investigation, senior officials said. A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign declined to comment.

At issue are thousands of pages of State Department emails from Mrs. Clinton’s private account. Mrs. Clinton has said she used the account because it was more convenient, but it also shielded her correspondence from congressional and Freedom of Information Act requests.

She faced sharp criticism after her use of the account became public, and subsequently said she would ask the State Department to release her emails.

The department is now reviewing some 55,000 pages of emails. A first batch of 3,000 pages was made public on June 30.

In the course of the email review, State Department officials determined that some information in the messages should be retroactively classified. In the 3,000 pages that were released, for example, portions of two dozen emails were redacted because they were upgraded to “classified status.” But none of those were marked as classified at the time Mrs. Clinton handled them.

In a second memo to Mr. Kennedy, sent on July 17, the inspectors general said that at least one email made public by the State Department contained classified information. The inspectors general did not identify the email or reveal its substance.

The memos were provided to The New York Times by a senior government official.

The inspectors general also criticized the State Department for its handling of sensitive information, particularly its reliance on retired senior Foreign Service officers to decide if information should be classified, and for not consulting with the intelligence agencies about its determinations.

In March, Mrs. Clinton insisted that she was careful in her handling of information on her private account. “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email,” she said. “There is no classified material. So I’m certainly well aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.”

In May, the F.B.I. asked the State Department to classify a section of Mrs. Clinton’s emails that related to suspects who may have been arrested in connection with the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. The information was not classified at the time Mrs. Clinton received it.

The revelations about how Mrs. Clinton handled her email have been an embarrassment for the State Department, which has been repeatedly criticized over its handling of documents related to Mrs. Clinton and her advisers.

On Monday, a federal judge sharply questioned State Department lawyers at a hearing in Washington about why they had not responded to Freedom of Information Act requests from The Associated Press, some of which were four years old.

“I want to find out what’s been going on over there — I should say, what’s not been going on over there,” said Judge Richard J. Leon of United States District Court, according to a transcript obtained by Politico. The judge said that “for reasons known only to itself,” the State Department “has been, to say the least, recalcitrant in responding.”

Two days later, lawmakers on the Republican-led House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks said they planned to summon Secretary of State John Kerry’s chief of staff to Capitol Hill to answer questions about why the department has not produced documents that the panel subpoenaed. That hearing is set for next Wednesday.

“The State Department has used every excuse to avoid complying with fundamental requests for documents,” said the chairman of the House committee, Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina.

Mr. Gowdy said that while the committee has used an array of measures to try to get the State Department to hand over documents, the results have been the same. “Our committee is not in possession of all documents needed to do the work assigned to us,” he said.

The State Department has sought to delay the hearing, citing continuing efforts to brief members of Congress on the details of the nuclear accord with Iran. It is not clear why the State Department has struggled with the classification issues and document production. Republicans have said the department is trying to use those processes to protect Mrs. Clinton.

State Department officials say they simply do not have the resources or infrastructure to properly comply with all the requests. Since March, requests for documents have significantly increased.

Some State Department officials said they believe that many senior officials did not initially take the House committee seriously, which slowed document production and created an appearance of stonewalling.

State Department officials also said that Mr. Kerry is concerned about the toll the criticism has had on the department and has urged his deputies to comply with the requests quickly.

When Ignoring the Enforcement of Law Becomes a Wider Threat

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There are an estimated 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States and some you would never imagine existed. For a sampling click here.

Further, click here for the evidence of organizations, missions and the functional manuals all justice and enforcement components.

If you would like to understand justice and enforcement statistics, click here. Indeed, there is a great argument that should happen that there are too many laws to be enforced much less those that are not prosecuted. All the while, when those that are omitted or discretion is used, the damage which speaks to the psyche of the criminal has yet to be fully understood as a threat to security and lawlessness.

Enter Victor Davis Hanson, where he authored a cogent piece on the threat of more lawlessness and anarchy.

Why disregard of law is America’s greatest threat

Citizens may ask why they should obey the rules when illegals go scot-free

Barbarians at the gate usually don’t bring down once-successful civilizations. Nor does climate change. Even mass epidemics like the plague that decimated sixth-century Byzantium do not necessarily destroy a culture.

Far more dangerous are institutionalized corruption, a lack of transparency and creeping neglect of existing laws. All the German euros in the world will not save Greece if Greeks continue to dodge taxes, featherbed government and see corruption as a business model.

Even obeying so-called minor laws counts. It is no coincidence that a country where drivers routinely flout traffic laws and throw trash out the window is also a country that cooks its books and lies to its creditors. Everything from littering to speeding seems negotiable in Athens in a way not true of Munich, Zurich or London.

Mexico is a naturally richer country than Greece. It is blessed with oil, precious minerals, fertile soils, long coastlines and warm weather. Hundreds of thousands of Mexican citizens should not be voting with their feet to reject their homeland for the United States.

But Mexico also continues to be a mess because police expect bribes, property rights are iffy, and government works only for those who pay kickbacks. The result is that only north, not south, of the U.S.-Mexico border can people expect upward mobility, clean water, adequate public safety and reliable power.

In much of the Middle East and Africa, tribalism and bribery, not meritocracy, determine who gets hired and fired, wins or loses a contract, or receives or goes without public services.

Americans, too, should worry about these age-old symptoms of internal decay.

The frightening thing about disgraced Internal Revenue Service bureaucrat Lois Lerner’s knowledge of selective audits of groups on the basis of their politics is not just that she seemed to ignore it, but that she seemingly assumed no one would find out, or perhaps even mind. And she may well have been right. So far, no one at the IRS has shown much remorse for corrupting an honor-based system of tax compliance.

Illegal immigration has been a prominent subject in the news lately, between Donald Trump’s politically incorrect, imprecise and crass stereotyping of illegal immigrants and the shocking murder of a young San Francisco woman gratuitously gunned down in public by a Mexican citizen who had been convicted of seven felonies in the United States and had been deported five times. But the subject of illegal immigration is, above all, a matter of law enforcement.

Ultimately, no nation can continue to thrive if its government refuses to enforce its own laws. Liberal “sanctuary cities” such as San Francisco choose to ignore immigration laws. Imagine the outcry if a town in Utah or Montana arbitrarily declared that federal affirmative action or gay marriage laws were null and void within its municipal borders.

Once an immigrant has successfully broken the law by entering and residing in the United States illegally, there is little incentive for him to obey other laws. Increasing percentages of unnaturalized immigrants are not showing up for their immigration hearings — and those percentages are higher still for foreign nationals who have been charged with crimes.

The general public wonders why some are selectively exempt from following the law, but others are not. If federal immigration law does not apply to foreign nationals, why should building codes, zoning laws or traffic statutes apply to U.S. citizens?

Consider the immigration activists’ argument that immigration authorities should focus only on known felons and not those who only broke immigration law. This is akin to arguing that the IRS shouldn’t worry about whether everyday Americans pay their income taxes and should enforce the tax laws only against those with past instances of tax avoidance.

But why single out the poor and foreign-born? Presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton once pocketed a $100,000 cattle-futures profit from a $1,000 investment, with help from an insider crony. A group of economists calculated the odds of such an unlikely return at one in 31 trillion. Mrs. Clinton then trumped that windfall by failing to fully pay taxes on her commodities profits, only addressing that oversight years later.

Why did Mrs. Clinton, during her tenure as secretary of state, snub government protocols by using a private email account and a private server, and then permanently deleting any emails she felt were not government-related? Mrs. Clinton long ago concluded that laws in her case were to be negotiated, not obeyed.

President Obama called for higher taxes on the wealthy. But before doing so, could he at least have asked his frequent adviser on racial matters, Al Sharpton, to pay millions in back taxes and penalties?

Might the government ask that its own employees pay the more than $3 billion in collective federal back taxes they owe, since they expect other taxpayers to keep paying their salaries?

Civilizations unwind insidiously not with a loud, explosive bang, but with a lawless whimper.

 

 

Center for American Progress Running Govt Agency Policy

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At the Environmental Protection Agency, the collusion with The Center for American Policy runs deep. Whether it is invoking a hidden carbon tax, controlling green house emissions or promoting the cottage industry of climate change, Barack Obama’s cabinet secretaries listen, take heed and obey.

All in the name of progress right? Not so much but rather in the quest for money, revenue and control of business.

The Collusion Begins, Emails and Facts are Funny Things and why Redact?

Center for American Progress Helped Craft EPA Press Strategy

Emails reveal liberal think tank’s climate strategy director advised top EPA officials on dealing with skeptical reporter
WFB:

A prominent left-wing group helped formulate Environmental Protection Agency talking points designed to sell a controversial regulatory scheme to skeptical journalists, internal emails show.

The emails show Joseph Goffman, the senior counsel of EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, circulating talking points from Center for American Progress climate strategy director Daniel Weiss among EPA colleagues attempting to sell the agency’s controversial power plant regulations to a New York Times reporter.

Weiss emailed Goffman in September 2013 with a series of suggestions for convincing the Times’ Matt Wald of the commercial viability of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology, a vital component of the agency’s stringent power plant emissions regulations.

Five minutes later, Goffman sent an email to five colleagues in his office and the agency’s public affairs division. Unredacted language in the email is identical to language in Weiss’ list of talking points.

The Environment & Energy (E&E) Legal Institute obtained the emails through a Freedom of Information Act request. Chris Horner, a senior legal fellow at E&E, said they show extensive behind-the-scenes collaboration between EPA and third-party groups that support the regulations.

“The chief lawyer tasked with making the global warming agenda happen cuts and pastes Team Soros arguments and strategies into emails and sends them to colleagues as his own,” Horner said in an email.

Weiss, who is now the senior vice president for campaigns at the League of Conservation Voters, another influential green group, did not respond to a request for comment.

Goffman took the lead in crafting the EPA’s legal justification for its power plant rules, which are expected to hit coal-fired power plants hardest. Laws require federal regulations to be commercially viable, so the EPA needed to show it was possible for coal plants to comply with the rule.

To do so, it relied on CCS technology, which it said could allow such plants to reduce carbon emissions below the regulations’ threshold. Critics of the rules, including the coal industry, said CCS was not “adequately demonstrated,” the standard for technology that allows private actors to comply with the regulations.

On Sept. 20, 2013, Weiss emailed Rohan Patel, a special assistant to President Obama who led White House messaging on the regulations, and Brian Bond, EPA’s associate administrator of public engagement and environmental education.

Weiss’ email had a frantic tone. “Very important,” the subject line said. “NYT to write CCS not adequately demonstrated?” He warned Bond and Patel that Wald sounded skeptical of CCS’s commercial viability. “It might be worth your while to have [EPA administrator] Gina [McCarthy] or some other senior person call him ASAP.”

Patel forwarded the email to Goffman, associate EPA administrator for public affairs Tom Reynolds, and Dan Utech, the president’s deputy assistant for energy and climate change. Reynolds and Goffman scheduled a phone call to discuss Wald’s forthcoming story.

Minutes later, Goffman emailed Weiss. “Thanks for the note on Matt Wald,” he wrote. “We’re on it.”

Weiss replied with a series of suggestions for selling Wald on CCS’s commercial viability. “The key is to make the most compelling case that CCS is ‘adequately demonstrated,’” he wrote. “Since the strategy of the opponents seems to be cast doubt on the technology, the more evidence that it is on its way, the stronger the case.”

Five minutes later, Goffman emailed five other EPA officials, including Reynolds. Most of the email is redacted, pursuant to a FOIA exemption designed to protect the confidentiality of internal deliberations among federal officials.

However, the first and last sentences are identical to language in Weiss’ email. Horner says that suggests that Goffman simply copied Weiss’ suggestions into his own message. “The brazen collusion is staggering,” he said.

“This is a spectacular example of how ideological activists brought in to the Obama administration to jam through the left-wing agenda see no distinction between EPA and their former green-group colleagues,” Horner said.

EPA spokeswoman Melissa Harrison dismissed concerns that Goffman had simply copied Weiss’ talking points into intra-agency communications.

“No one forwarded a suggestion as their own, and one email is not representative of how the agency works,” she said in an emailed statement.

“EPA’s priority is reaching out and engaging with the public and stakeholders so we hear from as many voices as possible,” Harrison said. “Nothing we do is about one individual or group coming up with an idea or suggestion.”

Wald’s eventual story, published on Sept. 20, cast doubt on the commercial viability of CCS technology.

“In the last few days, Ms. McCarthy has referred to several early-stage carbon capture projects as a sign that industry can build the needed equipment,” he wrote. “But the four she referred to in the committee hearing ranged from under construction to planned. None of them would sequester the carbon dioxide, and all would sell it.”

Five days later, Weiss co-authored a CAP paper echoing the points he had emailed to EPA.

CAP has been described as “a boot camp” for the Obama administration’s climate policy staff. A number of the think tank’s experts have moved on to influential roles in the administration, and its proposals are frequently incorporated into administration policies.

“Anyone who pays attention to these issues must acknowledge that CAP plays a very unique, almost extraordinary role in developing documents for the administration and in advancing personnel,” energy lobbyist Scott Segal told Greenwire in April.

Horner said collaboration between CAP and EPA illustrates a trend that has borne itself out in the language of regulations promulgated by the agency, including its rules regarding power plant emissions.

“Other emails I have obtained demonstrate that they take what the greens tell them and paste it in,” he said. “That’s unlawful and one of the major reasons these greenhouse gas rules need to be blocked.”

 

The Most Corrupt U.S. Govt Bank Goes Dark

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This is a small win for conservatives, but more it stops epic abuse and pay to play operations. The Exim Bank is for small business to be able to get global access. Would you consider Boeing or General Electric to be small?

 

(CNSNews.com) – Three corporations together received 44 percent of the Export-Import Bank’s $32.7 billion in assistance in 2011 – a total of $13.5 billion in federal financial aid. The three were Boeing, General Electric and international engineering firm Black and Veatch International.

Boeing alone received 38 percent of the bank’s financial assistance, or $12.4 billion ($11.7 billion for the mother company and another $700 million for its Boeing Satellite Systems subsidiary.)

General Electric received $1.2 billion while Black and Veatch received $805 million, according to the bank’s 2011 annual report.

The Export-Import Bank, whose authorization runs out in seven weeks’ time, is opposed by some conservatives who argue that it provides corporate welfare and below-market financing.

***  “The global economy is more integrated than ever … If we’re going to grow, it’s going to be because of exports. We’re on track to double our exports – a goal that I set when I came into office. Part of the reason for that is the terrific work that’s being done by our Export-Import Bank.”
President Barack Obama
November 12, 2011

It should be noted that the White House and the State Department had their hands all over this loan give-away agency. Note this is a State Department website link proving collusion and pay to play.

From the Washington Examiner:

Export-Import Bank enters ‘liquidation’ tomorrow night at midnight

Tuesday night at midnight, the 2014 reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank expires. The agency, under law, doesn’t evaporate immediately. Instead, per the law, Ex-Im enters “liquidation,” which is basically Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

Specifically, Ex-Im’s authorization allows it to continue to exist for one purpose: “exercising any of its functions subsequent to such date for purposes of orderly liquidation….”

Liquidation is Chapter 7 bankruptcy — which is exit, extinction. It is not Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which is what companies enter temporarily in order to reorganize and then come back. Ex-Im workers, when they return Wednesday morning, are supposed to be in the business of dismantling Ex-Im.

As I read it, that means Ex-Im is supposed to sell off the loans and guarantees on which it is currently sitting — not in a fire sale, but in an orderly fashion.

This isn’t a “lapse.” This is liquidation. I know many Ex-Im employees simply see this as a temporary lapse in lending authority, but that view is contrary to the law.

It will be interesting to see how Ex-Im officials follow the law.

Here is the full text of the relevant section of the law:

Export-Import Bank of the United States shall continue to exercise its functions in connection with and in furtherance of its objects and purposes until the close of business on September 30, 2014, but the provisions of this section shall not be construed as preventing the bank from acquiring obligations prior to such date which mature subsequent to such date or from assuming prior to such date liability as guarantor, endorser, or acceptor of obligations which mature subsequent to such date or from issuing, either prior or subsequent to such date, for purchase by the Secretary of the Treasury or any other purchasers, its notes, debentures, bonds, or other obligations which mature subsequent to such date or from continuing as a corporate agency of the United States and exercising any of its functions subsequent to such date for purposes of orderly liquidation, including the administration of its assets and the collection of any obligations held by the bank.