A nationwide government screening of more than one million children under five in Nepal has found malnutrition rates at crisis levels, with wasting — a measure of children who are dangerously underweight for their height — reaching 12.3% in the Madhesh province near the Indian border, well above the World Health Organization's 10% emergency threshold. Experts link the surge directly to the Trump administration's 2025 closure of USAID, which had funded community outreach programmes that identified and referred malnourished children for treatment; without that network, families are no longer reaching clinics even where therapeutic food supplies remain available. Nepal had been a model for reducing child mortality over the past two decades, and nutrition specialists warn that those hard-won gains are now at serious risk of being reversed.