The White House sent a combative response Tuesday after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) called for jumpstarting talks on the debt ceiling.

“It’s time for Republicans to stop playing games, pass a clean debt ceiling bill, and quit threatening our economic recovery,” said Karine Jean-Pierre, press secretary to President Joe Biden.

Her statement served as a retort to McCarthy’s letter to Biden on Tuesday, which warned that time is running out to raise the debt limit after their last meeting on the issue in February.

“With each passing day, I am incredibly concerned that you are putting an already fragile economy in jeopardy by insisting upon your extreme position of refusing to negotiate any meaningful changes to out of control government spending,” McCarthy wrote.

Mr. President:

I'm incredibly concerned you are putting an already fragile economy in jeopardy by insisting upon your extreme position on the debt limit. It’s time to drop partisanship, roll up our sleeves, & find common ground on this urgent challenge. https://t.co/HUbg7DckWU pic.twitter.com/t4zIaZUAqI

— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) March 28, 2023

As a starting place, McCarthy suggested he and Biden discuss ways to reduce spending and save taxpayer dollars. He listed potential areas for negotiation, including lowering “excessive” non-defense government spending, reclaiming unspent COVID relief funds, and shoring up work requirements “for those without dependents who can work.”

McCarthy asked that Biden’s team reach out to his office by the end of the week to set up their next meeting.

Time is of the essence, as experts warn of a default as early as this June that could cripple the U.S. economy.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen notified Congress in January that the United States had crossed the current statutory limit of $31.381 trillion and advised that her agency take “extraordinary measures” so the government could continue to pay its bills, but only in the short term.

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So far, the White House refuses to budge, putting the onus on Congress to raise the debt ceiling while faulting House Republicans for not introducing a budget proposal of their own as they demand spending cuts.

After noting Congress “has a constitutional obligation to address the debt limit – as they did three times in the previous administration without conditions,” Jean-Pierre said Biden “welcomes a separate conversation about our nation’s fiscal future.”

“Earlier this month, he released a budget that cuts the deficit by nearly $3 trillion while lowering costs for families and investing in America. Speaker McCarthy and his extreme MAGA caucus have refused to put out a budget,” Jean-Pierre said.

“All we’ve heard from them is a list of devastating cuts to law enforcement and border security and proposals to take health care away from Americans and raise health care and child care costs,” she added. “All to pay for their tax giveaway to the super-wealthy and corporations. In fact, their proposals don’t reduce the deficit at all.”

The mother of the heavily armed Nashville school shooter has been a proponent of gun control who expressed concerns about school shootings, social media posts show.

Norma Hale, the mother of the 28-year-old woman who was killed by police after murdering three 9-year-old children and three adults at Covenant School in Nashville on Monday, had posted various calls for gun control in years past.

On February 21, 2018, Hale posted a petition that stated, “Make large-capacity gun magazines illegal.” Roughly two weeks later, she posted a petition that urged, “Keep guns out of schools,” adding her own comment: “So important!”

The killer, a female who claimed to be a man, was armed with three guns, including a semi-automatic rifle when she stormed into the school she once attended and opened fire. After the incident, police searched her home and recovered a sawed-off shotgun and a second shotgun.

Hale told an ABC News reporter after the incident, “It’s very difficult now; we ask for privacy. I really can’t talk right now, I think I lost my daughter today.”

Nashville Police Chief John Drake said that the shooter had additional plans to attack a second location but decided against it because there was too much security there.

“If I had to imagine, [the shooter’s] parents are probably just as shocked as everybody in the neighborhood is … It just doesn’t seem real,” a resident of the neighborhood where Hale lives told The Daily Beast. “There’s nothing that would have led me to believe that she was capable of such a thing or that she or anybody in that family would have access to, much less ever used, a gun. They just don’t seem like the family that, like, is around guns. They’re not talking about going to a gun range or they’re not going hunting.”

A former high school classmate of the shooter told The Daily Wire, “I haven’t seen [the shooter] since graduation as I moved, and we didn’t keep in touch. But my memories from high school are all pleasant. … I mainly knew her as ‘she’ before the transition. When she transitioned, no one was surprised.” The classmate added that the school had “several LGBTQ and other trans students.”

Meanwhile, The New York Times scrambled after “confusion” on the shooter’s gender, writing, “There was confusion on Monday about the gender identity of the assailant in the Nashville shooting. Officials had used ‘she’ and ‘her’ to refer to the suspect, who, according to a social media post and a LinkedIn profile, appeared to identify as a man in recent months.”

Incredible. The New York Times apologizes for misgendering the Nashville mass shooter who murdered three kids and three adults because it disrespects the murderer’s memory and identity. Truly a cult. Woke mind virus in full swing. pic.twitter.com/yT0J6ldsC1

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) March 28, 2023

Related: ‘Not At All What One Would Expect’: Former Classmate Of Nashville School Shooter Says Peers Shocked By Tragic Mass Shooting