Nearly 30,000 pounds of ready-to-eat beef sticks were recalled on Thursday after consumers complained that they had found metal fragments in them, food safety and company officials said.

The voluntary recall affects Chomps Original Beef Sticks, but the company said in a statement posted online on Thursday and Friday that it was including Original Turkey sticks and additional product lots that were produced at Idaho Smokehouse Partners, based in Shelley, Idaho.

The Food Safety and Inspection Service, which is under the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said in a statement that the agency was informed of “two consumer complaints reporting that pieces of metal were found in the product.”

The products subject to the recall were packaged at a single facility from Jan. 16 through Jan. 23, according to Chomps. The Food Safety and Inspection Service said that the recalled items were shipped to retail locations in California and Illinois.

The company said the turkey products added to the recall were not included in the 29,541 pounds of recalled beef sticks reported by federal regulators, but it did not provide a weight for the additional items.

There have been no confirmed injuries from consuming the products, the Food Safety and Inspection Service said, adding that anyone who is concerned about an injury should contact a health care provider.

Consumers who purchased the recalled items are urged to throw them away or return them to the store.

Idaho Smokehouse Partners said in a statement on Saturday that after becoming “aware of the two complaints,” it “worked with regulatory authorities on the best way to protect consumers from this issue.”

“We are taking this action because we are committed to the highest food safety standards for the consumers of our products,” the company added.

Chomps said in a statement on Saturday that the decision to recall the items was “made following a thorough investigation conducted alongside our manufacturing partner” and under the oversight of the Agriculture Department.

The company said it “chose to broaden the scope of the recall beyond what was required, ensuring that all product packaged during that time frame was fully accounted for and removed from the market.”

Chomps also said that it had added “further safeguards to prevent this from happening again.”

Since President Trump began his second term in January, no high-level officials from the United States have met with their counterparts in China, even as the world’s two largest economies have taken turns imposing steep tariffs on each other.

In the absence of official meetings, Senator Steve Daines of Montana has cast himself as a go-between. Mr. Daines met with Vice Premier He Lifeng, who oversees many economic issues for China, on Saturday and was set to meet Premier Li Qiang, the country’s second-highest official, on Sunday.

In an interview with The New York Times on Saturday after the meeting with Mr. He, Mr. Daines, a Republican member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he urged China to take effective action to halt the export of chemical precursors for fentanyl.

“I met with President Trump a few days before I came over, and he was pleased that I was coming to communicate his ‘America First’ message and, importantly, to make sure that Chinese leaders knew the seriousness of the fentanyl issue, and the role that China can play in stopping the shipment of precursors to the Mexican cartels,” Mr. Daines said.

Chinese officials have said that the fentanyl crisis is rooted in an American failure to curb demand for the drug, and that Beijing has taken effective measures to limit shipments of fentanyl and its chemical precursors. China’s cabinet issued a report earlier this month on its fentanyl measures, and Mr. Daines said this was being studied by American officials.

Mr. Daines said he was trying to lay the groundwork for a meeting between President Trump and Xi Jinping, China’s top leader. “This visit is the first step to arrange and set up the next step, which will be a very important meeting between President Xi and President Trump — when that occurs, I don’t know, where it occurs, I don’t know.”

The White House has not named Mr. Daines as acting on its behalf. But Mr. Daines is one of Mr. Trump’s top allies in Congress. He was the first member of the Republican leadership in the Senate to endorse Mr. Trump in 2023 for a second term at a time when many Republican senators were leery of seeing Mr. Trump return to the White House.

“Given Senator Daines’s relationship to Donald Trump, China certainly wants to learn from him about Trump’s China policy intentions — whether he still wants to make a deal with China, and if so, what the deal would look like,” said Wu Xinbo, dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai.

China also wants Senator Daines to “bring a message to Donald Trump that China wants to sit down to talk with the U.S. side and to avoid further escalation of the tensions,” Mr. Wu said.

Mr. Trump has imposed 20 percent tariffs on goods from China and threatened more. China wants to head off further tariffs.

“There’s a window of opportunity before early April for China and the U.S. to engage each other, and Senator Daines’s visit could play a pivotal role,” Mr. Wu said.

Mr. Daines said that he was not focusing on tariffs with China, because the Office of the United States Trade Representative has not yet finished a policy review.

Mr. Trump has said he plans to meet with Mr. Xi, without specifying details. China has said nothing publicly about a meeting. But the contacts between working-level administration officials that typically precede such a meeting have been absent so far during Mr. Trump’s second term.

Mr. Xi makes all important decisions in China, particularly on foreign policy. That makes summits with American presidents particularly important in setting the trajectory of bilateral relations. The two leaders met in 2017 when Mr. Xi went to Mar-a-Lago, in Florida, and Mr. Trump went to China.

The lack of engagement with Washington until now has led some in Beijing to begin to doubt whether Mr. Trump is sincere in his expressed desire to meet Mr. Xi, said Yun Sun, the director of the China program at the Stimson Center in Washington.

“They see him changing his position rapidly on a number of issues,” Ms. Sun said. “That translates into an almost fatalism for the Chinese, that they should aim to prepare for the worst case scenario, that’s their conclusion.”

Mr. Daines said he also expressed concern about China’s barriers to imports, beyond just tariffs, during his visit to Beijing. He declined to provide any specifics. But Montana politicians have long argued that China’s intermittent halts on imports of beef from the state are unfair trade barriers, and not the result of any actual concerns about mad cow disease, as Beijing contends.

Mr. Daines lived for six years in southern China in the 1990s as a project manager for Procter & Gamble, the American consumer products giant.

This weekend’s trip is Mr. Daines’s sixth to China since his election to the Senate in 2014, making him one of the few members of Congress who have continued traveling to the country even as relations have deteriorated.

A shorter open enrollment period, less help choosing a plan, higher health insurance premiums for many people — those are just a few changes now brewing that could affect your health insurance for 2026 if you have coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplace. One shift is the scheduled end of more generous financial subsidies that, in recent years, have allowed many more people to qualify for marketplace plans with lower or no monthly premiums.

What’s more, the Trump administration, through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, proposed a new rule on March 10 involving about a dozen changes affecting enrollment and eligibility in the marketplaces. The agency, which oversees the marketplaces, said the rule was intended to improve affordability while “maintaining fiscal responsibility.”

Some health insurance experts, however, say the changes could make it more challenging for people to enroll in or renew coverage. If it becomes final, the rule will “restrict marketplace eligibility, enrollment and affordability,” according to an analysis in the journal Health Affairs that was co-written by Katie Keith, director of the Health Policy and the Law initiative at Georgetown University Law Center.

The public still has a few weeks to comment on the proposal. The administration is likely to move quickly to write a final version because insurers are now developing rates for health plans for 2026, Ms. Keith said.

Here are some of the possible changes to look out for.

Why is extra financial help for premiums set to end?

Enhanced premium help, first offered in 2021 as part of the federal government’s pandemic relief program, was extended through 2025 by the Inflation Reduction Act. The more generous subsidies increased aid to low-income people who already qualified for financial help under the Affordable Care Act, and added aid for those with higher incomes (more than $60,240 for individual coverage in 2025 coverage) who didn’t previously qualify.

The extra subsidies, given in the form of tax credits, helped marketplace enrollment balloon to some 24 million people this year, from about 12 million in 2021. The average enhanced subsidy, which varies by a person’s income, is about $700 per year, said Cynthia Cox, a health care expert at KFF, a nonprofit research group.

Unless Congress renews them, however, the extra subsidies will expire at the end of this year. Almost all marketplace enrollees would see “steep” premium increases in 2026, according to a KFF analysis. And about 2.2 million people could become uninsured next year because of higher premiums, the Congressional Budget Office estimates.

While the extra help has expanded coverage, it comes at a price. If made permanent, the more generous subsidies would cost $335 billion over the next 10 years, according to budget office projections.

With Republicans in control of Congress, it’s unclear if Democrats can broker a deal to continue the Biden-era enhanced subsidies.

How would open enrollment change for Obamacare plans?

The Trump administration’s proposed rule would shorten, by roughly four weeks, the annual window when people select coverage for the coming year. Open enrollment would start on Nov. 1 and end on Dec. 15 for all marketplace exchanges. Currently, the federal end date is Jan. 15, and some state exchanges keep enrollment open as late as Jan. 31.

In a fact sheet about the rule, the administration said the reasons for the change included reducing “consumer confusion” and aligning the window more closely with enrollment dates for many job-based health plans.

However, consumer advocates say that if the goal is to encourage enrollment, a January deadline makes sense. People are often busy during the year-end holiday season, so the extra weeks give people more time to consider their coverage, said Cheryl Fish-Parcham, director of private coverage at Families USA, a health insurance advocacy group.

Louise Norris, a health policy analyst at Healthinsurance.org, a consumer information and referral website, said a mid-December deadline could put some people in a bind.

Most people covered by marketplace plans are automatically re-enrolled for the coming year, but some may not realize that their premium has changed until they get a bill in January. Under the current January open enrollment deadline, if they can no longer afford their plan, they can still switch to less expensive coverage starting in February. “You have a ‘do over,’” Ms. Norris said. But if the enrollment deadline moves to December, they could be faced with a more costly plan, or dropping coverage.

Would special enrollment windows be affected?

Most people can’t sign up for Obamacare coverage outside open enrollment unless they have a big life event, like losing a job, getting married or having a baby, that qualifies them for a special enrollment window. But in 2022, an exception was created to allow low-income people (annual income of up to $22,590 for individual coverage in 2025) to enroll year-round.

The Trump administration’s proposed rule would abolish this option, which has been available in most states. The agency says it is ending the special enrollment period for low-income people because of concern that it contributes to “unauthorized” enrollments, including when rogue brokers enroll people in plans without their knowledge. The exception may end sometime this year, before open enrollment begins, health experts said.

People who have delayed seeking coverage should consider checking their eligibility now, Ms. Norris said. “That opportunity might go away well before open enrollment,” she said.

In recent years, Ms. Norris said, Healthcare.gov has verified eligibility for special enrollment periods only if the stated reason was a loss of other coverage, the most common reason. But the new rule, citing an apparent increase in “misuse and abuse” of special enrollment periods, would reinstate verification for all reasons.

“We know the more hoops people have to jump through, the less likely they are to enroll,” Ms. Norris said.

Will ‘dreamers’ still be eligible for coverage?

No. The administration’s proposed rule would exclude DACA recipients, known as “dreamers,” from Affordable Care Act health plans. (DACA stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a program adopted in 2012 that applies to certain undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children.) DACA recipients are protected from deportation and can work legally. They were given access to marketplace insurance plans in late 2024 under the Biden administration and remain eligible in all but 19 states, where an injunction prohibits their enrollment, according to the National Immigration Law Center. (The legal status of the dreamers generally remains uncertain because of an ongoing court challenge.)

Where can I share my opinion about the proposed rule?

Public comments can be submitted online or by mail until April 11. Details are available on the Federal Register website.

Will I be able to get help choosing a marketplace plan?

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in February cut funding for “navigators,” helpers who guide people through selecting a health plan, to $10 million this year, from almost $100 million under the Biden administration. Navigator groups also conduct outreach and education, and help people who aren’t eligible for marketplace plans enroll in Medicaid, according to KFF. The Trump administration argues that the navigator program isn’t cost effective.