Over at Downsizing Government, we focused on the following issues this week:

• Another example of why the U.S. Postal Service should be privatized.
• Given the federal government’s continued post‐​emergency bureaucratic bungling, Congress should devolve responsibility for disaster assistance to state and local governments, private insurance companies, and charities.
• Federal taxpayers helping foot the tab for renovations to a local wine bar? It sounds crazy, but that’s par for the course with HUD’s Community Development Block Grant program.
• Much of the increase in nondefense discretionary spending during the past decade came when the GOP controlled the House, Senate, and White House. So now is the GOP’s chance to start reversing all those Bush‐​era increases.
• Republicans should use the debt limit vote as an opportunity to press the administration for budgetary reforms that address a potentially ruinous debt burden that has been driven by the profligate spending of both parties.