There were many influential policy decisions at the Federal level that pushed for defunding public programs, such as cutting federal grants/loan forgiveness for teacher training
To use one of the cited programs, the US school system, as an example: per-pupil inflation-adjusted spending on schools is the highest it's ever been, and has been continuously increasing: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_236.55.a...
Also, Federal spending only covers about 8% of public school budgets: https://theconversation.com/federal-spending-covers-only-8-o...