Federal health officials have reversed the decision to fire a few dozen scientists at the Food and Drug Administration’s food-safety labs, and say they are conducting a review to determine if other critical posts were cut.

A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed the rehirings and said that several employees would also be restored to the offices that deal with Freedom of Information requests, an area that was nearly wiped out.

In the last few months, roughly 3,500 F.D.A. jobs, about 20 percent, were eliminated, representing one of the largest work force reductions among all government agencies targeted by the Trump administration.

The H.H.S. spokesman said those employees called back had been inadvertently fired because of inaccurate job classification codes.

The decision to rehire specialists on outbreaks of food-related illnesses and those who study the safety of products like infant formula follows contradictory assertions made by Dr. Marty Makary, the F.D.A. commissioner, in media interviews this week.

“I can tell you there were no cuts to scientists or inspectors,” Dr. Makary said Wednesday on CNN.

In fact, scientists had been fired from several food and drug safety labs across the country, including in Puerto Rico, and from the veterinary division where bird flu safety work was underway. Scientists in the tobacco division who were dismissed in February — including some who studied the health effects of e-cigarettes — remain on paid leave and have not been tapped to return, according to employees who were put on leave.

How many fired employees will be permitted to return remained unclear.

About 40 employees at the Moffett Lab in Chicago and at a San Francisco-area lab are being offered their jobs back, the department spokesman said. Scientists in those labs studied a variety of aspects of food safety, from how chemicals and germs pass through food packaging to methods for keeping bacteria out of infant formula. Some scientists in Chicago reviewed the work and results of other labs to ensure that milk and seafood were safe.

Dr. Robert Califf, the F.D.A. commissioner under President Joseph R. Biden, said the terms “decapitated and eviscerated” seemed fitting to describe the steep loss of expertise at the agency. He said the F.D.A. was already falling behind on meetings meant to help companies develop safe products — and to design studies that give clear answers about their effectiveness.

“Most of it is really at this level of fundamental, day-to-day work that has a huge impact overall, but it’s not very controversial,” he said. “It’s just that it takes work, and they have to have people to do the work.”

Dr. Makary has also said the layoffs did not target product reviewers or inspectors. But their work has been hampered by voluntary departures, the elimination of support staff and the broader disruption at an agency where many are fleeing for the exits, according to former staff members.

Hundreds of drug and medical device reviewers, who make up about one-fourth of the agency work force, have recused themselves from key projects, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former agency commissioner, said on CNBC. Under F.D.A. ethics rules, staff members who are interviewing for jobs cannot do agency review work on products by companies where they are seeking employment — or for a competitor.

Dr. Gottlieb also said cuts to the office of generic drug policy wiped out employees with expertise in determining which brand-name drugs are eligible to be made as lower-cost generics, calling those job eliminations “profound.” Approving generic drugs can save consumers billions of dollars.

Support staff for inspectors investigating food and drug plants overseas were also cut, raising security concerns. Dozens of workers who lost their jobs attended to security monitoring to ensure that inspectors were safe, especially in hostile nations.

Virginia Giuffre, a former victim of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring who said she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” as a teenager to rich and powerful predators, including Prince Andrew of Britain, died on Friday at her farm in Western Australia. She was 41.

Ms. Giuffre died by suicide, according to a statement from the family. Ms. Giuffre (pronounced JIFF-ree) wrote in an Instagram post March that she was days away from dying of renal failure after being injured in a crash with a school bus that she said was traveling at nearly 70 m.p.h.

In 2019, Mr. Epstein was arrested and charged by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York with sex trafficking and conspiracy, and was accused of soliciting teenage girls to perform massages that became increasingly sexual in nature.

Barely a month after he was apprehended, and a day after documents were released from Ms. Giuffre’s successful defamation suit against him, Mr. Epstein was found hanged in his cell in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan. His death, at 66, was ruled a suicide.

In 2009 Ms. Giuffre, identified then only as Jane Doe 102, had sued Mr. Epstein, accusing him and Ghislaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator and the daughter of the disgraced British media magnate Robert Maxwell, of recruiting her to join his sex trafficking ring when she was a minor under the guise of becoming a professional masseuse.

In 2015, she was the first of Mr. Epstein’s victims to give up her anonymity and go public, selling her story to The Mail on Sunday, a British tabloid.

“Basically, I was training to be a prostitute for him and his friends who shared his interest in young girls,” Ms. Giuffre was quoted as saying in Nigel Cawthorne’s book, “Virginia Giuffre: The Extraordinary Life Story of the Masseuse Who Pursued and Ended the Sex Crimes of Millionaires Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein” (2022).

“Ghislaine told me that I have to do for Andrew what I do for Jeffrey,” she said.

Ms. Giuffre accused Mr. Epstein, a millionaire financier, and Ms. Maxwell, a British socialite, of forcing her to have sex with Prince Andrew, also known as the Duke of York. He flatly denied the accusations, but relinquished his royal duties in 2019.

In 2021 she sued the prince, who is the younger brother of King Charles II, for sexually assaulting her at Ms. Maxwell’s home in London and at Mr. Epstein’s homes in Manhattan and Little St. James in the Virgin Islands.

A widely published photograph showed Prince Andrew with his hand around her waist; he said he had no memory of the occasion.

After Prince Andrew agreed to settle the suit by Ms. Giuffre in 2022, he praised her in a statement for speaking out and pledged to “demonstrate his regret” for his association with Mr. Epstein “by supporting the fight against the evils of sex trafficking, and by supporting its victims.”

The settlement included an undisclosed sum to be paid to her and to her charity, now called Speak Out, Act, Reclaim.

In interviews and depositions, Ms. Giuffre said she was recruited to the sex ring in 2000 while working as a locker room attendant in President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla. By her account she was reading a massage therapy manual when she was approached by Ms. Maxwell and was invited to become Mr. Epstein’s traveling masseuse. She said that the pair then groomed her to perform sexual services for wealthy men.

She sued Ms. Maxwell for defamation in 2015; they settled on an undisclosed sum in 2017. Ms. Maxwell’s trial and conviction in 2022 were viewed as a legal reckoning that Mr. Epstein had denied the judicial system — and his victims — by hanging himself. Ms. Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Virginia Louise Roberts was born on Aug. 9, 1983, in Sacramento to Sky and Lynn Roberts. When she was 4, the family moved to Palm Beach County, where her father was a maintenance manager at Mar-a-Lago.

She said she ran away from home after having been molested by a close family friend since she was 7. She was placed in foster homes, boarded with an aunt in California, fled to the former hippie haven of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, lived on the streets when she was 14 and spent six months with a 65-year-old sex trafficker who abused her.

Compared to living on the streets and earning $9 an hour for her summer job at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Epstein’s offer to make $200 a massage — several times a day — was, Mr. Cawthorne wrote, one that “Virginia had determined for herself she could not refuse.”

But her mandate went well beyond. She told the BBC in 2019 that she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” to Mr. Epstein’s friends and ferried around the world on private jets.

In 2002, when she was 19, she enrolled in the International Training Massage School in Thailand to become a professional masseuse and was assigned to recruit a young girl for the ring. There, she met Robert Giuffre, an Australian martial arts instructor, and they married.

The couple had three children and lived in Australia, Florida and Colorado before settling in Perth in 2020. They have since separated. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.

Ms. Giuffre told The Miami Herald in 2019 that the birth of her daughter in 2010 prompted her to speak publicly about her victimization. She also explained why she had originally agreed to let Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell groom her as a masseuse and to provide sexual services.

“They seemed like nice people so I trusted them, and I told them I’d had a really hard time in my life up until then — I’d been a runaway, I’d been sexually abused, physically abused,” Ms. Giuffre said. “That was the worst thing I could have told them because now they knew how vulnerable I was.”

Hank Sanders contributed reporting.

The Trump administration, which has made clear that it aims to slash government spending, is preparing to unveil a budget proposal as soon as next week that includes draconian cuts that would entirely eliminate some federal programs and fray the nation’s social safety net.

The proposed budget for the 2026 fiscal year would cut billions of dollars from programs that support child care, health research, education, housing assistance, community development and the elderly, according to preliminary documents reviewed by The New York Times. The proposal, which is being finalized by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, also targets longstanding initiatives that have been prized by Democrats and that Republicans view as “woke” or wasteful spending.

Technically, the president’s blueprint is merely a formal recommendation to Congress, which must ultimately adopt any changes to spending. The full extent of President Trump’s proposed cuts for 2026 is not yet clear. Rachel Cauley, a spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget, said in a statement that “no final funding decisions have been made.”

But early indications suggest the budget will aim to formalize Mr. Trump’s disruptive reorganization of the federal government. That process — largely overseen by the tech billionaire Elon Musk — has frozen billions of dollars in aid, shuttered some programs and dismissed thousands of workers from their jobs, prompting numerous court challenges.

The early blueprint reflects Mr. Trump’s long-held belief that some federal antipoverty programs are unnecessary or rife with waste, fraud and abuse. And it echoes many of the ideas espoused by his budget director, Russell T. Vought, a key architect of Project 2025 who subscribes to the view that the president has expansive powers to ignore Congress and cancel spending viewed as “woke and weaponized.” He previously endorsed some of the cuts to housing, education and other programs that Mr. Trump is expected to unveil in the coming days.

The White House is expected to release the budget as soon as next week, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the highly secretive process. The president is expected to couple his blueprint for 2026 with a second measure — also set for release next week — that would slash more than $9 billion in previously approved spending for the current fiscal year, including money that funds PBS and NPR.

In total, the proposed cuts are likely to inform Republican lawmakers as they look for ways to fund their economic agenda, including a package that would extend and expand a set of tax cuts enacted during Mr. Trump’s first term. Their ambitions are projected to cost trillions of dollars, though Republican leaders have explored whether to invoke a budget accounting trick to make it seem as though their tax package does not add considerably to the federal debt.

In an interview with Time published on Friday, Mr. Trump suggested that he liked the idea of making millionaires pay higher taxes to help offset tax cuts for others but also said it would be politically untenable.

Some of the cuts the administration is envisioning could exacerbate the federal deficit. The White House is looking to reduce about $2.5 billion from the budget of the Internal Revenue Service with the goal of ending the Biden administration’s “weaponization of I.R.S. enforcement,” which it said targeted conservatives and small businesses. Budget scorekeepers have previously said that cuts to the I.R.S. would reduce the amount of revenue coming into the government, since it would make it harder for the tax collector to go after businesses and people who owe money but do not pay.

In many cases, the draft budget slashes many federal antipoverty programs, generally by cutting their funds and consolidating them into grants sent to the states to manage. The full extent of those changes is not clear, but the result could be fewer programs and dollars serving low-income Americans, who may be at risk of losing some benefits.

Among the most prominent programs that could be eliminated is Head Start, which provides early education and child care for some of the nation’s poorest children.

Documents reviewed by The Times show the White House is considering a $12.2 billion cut, which would wipe out the program. The budget document says Head Start uses a “radical” curriculum and gives preference to illegal immigrants. A description of the program also criticizes it for diversity, equity and inclusion programming and the use of resources that encourage toddlers to welcome children and families with different sexual orientations.

Despite the Trump administration’s pledge to make housing more affordable, the budget draft would reduce funding for several programs that support housing developments or provide rental assistance. The budget proposes saving $22 billion by replacing the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s rental assistance programs with a state-based initiative that would have a two-year cap on rent subsidies for healthy adults.

The draft budget also eliminates the Home Investment Partnerships Program, cutting the $1.25 billion fund that provides grants to states and cities for urban development projects on the basis that it is “duplicative” of other federal housing programs. It also cuts the $644 million housing block grant programs for Native Americans and Native Hawaiians, saying that these would be unnecessary because of new, unspecified initiatives such as enhanced “opportunity zones” that would give states greater incentives to provide affordable housing.

The overhaul of the nation’s health research apparatus, a few years after the coronavirus pandemic killed millions of people around the world, could also be drastic, with about $40 billion in proposed cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services.

The draft budget recommends cutting $8.8 billion from the National Institutes of Health, which it declared has “broken the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health.”

The proposal would consolidate and shrink some of the agency’s core functions that focus on chronic diseases and epidemics. It would entirely eliminate funding for some divisions, such as the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, which would lose the $534 million that it currently receives.

The budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would be almost halved, to $5.2 billion from $9.2 billion. Associated programs such as the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response would be eliminated. A note in the preliminary document refers to overdose prevention funding by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration as the “Biden crack pipe.”

Although Mr. Trump has said he prioritizes “law and order” in his presidency, his budget proposes about $2 billion of combined cuts to the F.B.I., the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The D.E.A. cuts would scale back international counternarcotics efforts in European countries that are equipped to crack down on drug trafficking. The A.T.F. cuts would eliminate offices at the agency that the Trump administration says have “criminalized law-abiding gun ownership through regulatory fiat.”

The proposal said the goal was to invest in getting F.B.I. agents into the field and to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs at the bureau that were “pet projects” of the Biden administration.

“Importantly, this administration is committed to undoing the weaponization of the F.B.I. that pervaded during the previous administration, which included targeting peaceful, pro-life protesters, concerned parents at school board meetings and citizens opposed to radical transgender ideology,” said the note explaining the proposed cuts.

As part of Mr. Trump’s “America First” approach, the budget draft calls for more than $16 billion in combined cuts for economic and disaster support for Europe, Eurasia and Central Asia, as well as humanitarian and refugee assistance and U.S.A.I.D. operations.

“To ensure every tax dollar spent puts America First, all foreign assistance is paused,” the draft budget document said. “To be clear, this is not a withdrawal from the world.”

With many Americans concerned that President Trump’s tariffs will make most products more expensive and possibly tip the United States into a recession, some consumers say they are opting out of spending on a wide range of items.

Instead of shopping lists, they are making “No Buy” lists.

No more outfits destined to be worn only once. No more “just because” T.J. Maxx runs. No more salon haircuts and manicures. No more eating out at restaurants. No more TikTok Shop.

This uncertain economic moment is reinvigorating a trend that took off early this year: No Buy 2025. (See also: “Low Buy” and “Slow Buy.”)

How it’s pronounced

/nō bī/

Even before the tariff threat, in thousands of videos on TikTok, users lamented how their closets and bathroom cabinets were filled to the brim with never-worn boots and years-old unopened face creams. They were unsubscribing from brands’ emails and texts, blocking retailers on X and opting out of personalized ads on TikTok. They promised themselves — and their followers — that they would stick to the challenge for the year.

It wasn’t necessarily a resolution to buy absolutely nothing. But many saw it as a moment to focus on “underconsumption.”

Now, with America imposing a minimum 10 percent tariff on nearly all its trading partners and a tariff of more than 100 percent on many Chinese goods, the no-buy challenge has become more urgent. People are preparing for higher prices on a range of products and, if a trade war drags on, the possibility that layoffs will follow and that they will have no choice but to cut back.

One TikTok user said she was adding “trendy clothes” from Shein and YesStyle to her no-buy list “because these things are getting tariffs on them anyway.”

Americans have flirted with the idea of commercial minimalism in the past, according to Silvia Bellezza, an associate professor at Columbia Business School. In a 2022 article she co-wrote with Anne V. Wilson, the authors draw a timeline of influences, including minimalist art in the 1960s, John Lennon’s plea to “imagine no possessions” in the 1970s and the now-famous 1982 photograph of Steve Jobs wearing a simple black sweater while sitting on the floor of his sparsely furnished room.

The concept of less is more came to the fore again in the 2010s, Ms. Bellezza said in an interview, as Americans were introduced to Marie Kondo’s concepts of decluttering through her book and Netflix series.

Social media has long encouraged people’s spending — or overspending — habits. The apps are rife with videos of influencers hawking everything from press-on nails to kitchen strainers.

But online platforms also have the power to give a face to this latest wave of minimalism.

“Social media allows you to make nonconsumption visible because it’s the act of nonconsuming that becomes Instagrammable,” Ms. Bellezza said.

The “No Buy” hashtag helps keep it “trendy and young,” she added.

(For what it’s worth, just as some U.S. consumers are declaring a “No Buy” year, some are leaning into “reckless consumerism” with the mind-set of “Nothing even matters anymore, why not finally book that vacation to Greece?” Others, in a bid to beat the tariff price bumps, are panic buying items to stockpile.)

For some who had already made “No Buy” pledges, the new economic uncertainty is causing some consternation.

As one TikTok user recently mused: “Now I have to cut out more. Am I just going to be eating croutons to get through the summer? I don’t know.”