Two weeks later, an American website called The Grayzone published a report with a very different angle. Its claim: that Nepal's new leaders, the men now running the flood response, were, in its words, "groomed for power" by a US government programme. That story has since spread across Nepali social media. So we went through it line by line.
The article has two halves. The first is a critique of how the Balen Shah government handled the flood. The second is the headline claim: that leaked documents show Prime Minister Balen Shah, RSP chair Rabi Lamichhane, Home Minister Sudan Gurung and MP Sagar Dhakal listed as "catalytic civic leaders" that a US-funded programme said it would support.
The documents are a work plan from a programme called Niti Sambad, or Policy Dialogue, run by a consortium known as CEPPS.
Start with what is solid.
The programme existed. USAID awarded it on the 24th of July 2017, running to July 2022, with a ceiling of 20 million dollars. Its partners were three organisations: the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute. None of that is secret, and none of it is new. An Indian newspaper reported the same award back in March this year.We read the published document ourselves. What is in it is fairly ordinary democracy assistance: support for the Election Commission, voter education, civics material for school teachers, a leadership course for women with disabilities, training for sitting members of parliament, and national opinion surveys shared with all the major parties. It also says the work was in line with Washington's Indo-Pacific Strategy, which is a fair thing for viewers to weigh.
Now the part that matters most. We could only extract about the first 37 of roughly 70 pages of that published file, and the passage naming the four politicians is not in the portion we could read. So we cannot confirm it, and we cannot rule it out. But even if the names are there, look at what that would actually prove. A line saying a programme "will support" someone is a plan, not a receipt. It does not show that any of these men attended a training, took any money, or were told what to do. And the parliamentary forum the article points to was designed for sitting MPs back in 2019. None of these four men was an MP then. Lamichhane entered parliament in 2022. Shah and Gurung in March this year.
Then there are the errors.
The article calls CEPPS an offshoot of the National Endowment for Democracy. It is not. CEPPS was set up in 1995 and funded by USAID.
It says the disaster happened in September. It happened on the 26th of August.
It says the government demanded donations go into accounts leaders oversee personally. The Prime Minister's Office told donors to check the account name reads Prime Minister Disaster Relief Fund, which is the state fund.
It says Lamichhane had to resign because he failed to renounce his US citizenship. The Supreme Court actually ruled he had not properly reacquired Nepali citizenship after renouncing the American one.
It hints the protest inquiry report was shaped by the current government. That report was handed over on the 8th of March. This government took office on the 27th.
One more piece worth slowing down on. The article uses a Reuters story to argue that China did warn Nepal in time. The email is real, but it was a routine forecast of heavy monsoon rain for the 14th to the 19th of August. It was not a warning about a glacier collapse on the 26th. And the same Reuters report quotes Nepali officials saying they had asked China for glacier and water-level data and had not received what they wanted. This matters because the flood set off a wave of misinformation in both directions: some blamed Chinese dams, which satellite analysis ruled out, while others used the disaster to score points against Washington. Press Council Nepal has ordered dozens of accounts to take down false content, and Chinese authorities have punished people for the same thing on their side.
To be fair to it, the article's account of public anger is largely accurate, and it is mostly built from Nepali reporting. The Prime Minister did tell parliament that no country has the expertise or technology for this kind of tunnel rescue, and engineers publicly said he was wrong, pointing to rescues in India, China, Peru and Chile. The Foreign Ministry did initially turn down foreign search-and-rescue teams, citing the coordination mess after the 2015 earthquake, before letting in experts from India, China, Australia and South Korea days later. The power producers did say that delay cost time. RSP's own chairman had to tell his MPs to stop doing what Nepali media called disaster tourism. And 31 civil society figures publicly criticised the centralised relief system. None of that requires a leaked document to establish.
So where does that leave us. The funding programme is real and was already public. The claim that it produced Nepal's government is not proven by anything published so far. Three things would settle it: the full document, released and authenticated; records showing whether these men ever took part in anything; and answers from the people named. Until then, the honest description is an allegation, not a finding. And the flood questions; why the warning system failed, why help was delayed, where the relief money goes; those deserve answers on their own, whoever funded whose training seven years ago.
