Just weeks after President Donald Trump proposed axing $9 billion in federal education programs, he said his administration is planning to “spend a lot of money” on education in order to increase the number of students graduating with the skills needed to fill current employment gaps.

“We’re going to spend a lot of money … and we’re going to get some great talent having to do with education because there is nothing more important than education,” he said at a town hall for CEOs Tuesday morning.

The comments were in response to a question about how the administration might help better prepare students to graduate with the skills CEOs are looking for, in particular through the expansion of apprenticeship programs and public-private partnerships.

But in answering, Trump largely fell back to campaign rhetoric, slamming the Common Core State Standards, touting the benefits of charter schools, and promising to return the decision-making power over education to state and local school leaders.

“I like the fact we’re getting rid of Common Core,” Trump said. “We have to end it. We have to bring education local.”

Common Core is the set of academic benchmarks for what students should know by the time they finish each grade. They were develop by the National Governors Association and business groups in direct response to business leaders complaining that students were not graduating high school with the skills and knowledge needed for college and career.

“We can’t be managing education from Washington,” Trump continued to riff off his comments about the Common Core. “When I go out to Iowa, and when I go out to the different states, they want to run their school programs locally and they’ll do a much better job. These are some very good people in Washington, but you also have bureaucrats that make a lot of money and don’t really care that much about what they’re doing or the community that they have never seen.”

Notably, decisions over academic standards have always been a state responsibility and not something handed down by the federal government. The new federal education law, signed into law a year before Trump took office, made that even more explicit in prohibiting the education secretary from in any way forcing states to adopt certain standards.

“Charter schools are another thing people are talking about a lot,” Trump said in answering the question about how to better prepare students. “The charter schools of New York have been amazing. They’re doing incredibly well. People can’t even get in.”

He continued: “I don’t call it an experiment anymore. It’s far beyond an experiment.”