Government contracting reconstitutes boundaries of the public sector through ever-deepening engagement of the contemporary state with business firms and nonprofit organizations. This outsourcing of public functions is frequently characterized as a move to maximize cost efficiency or advance public welfare. Nevertheless, government contracting also expresses ideological commitments and institutional opportunities for harnessing government revenues to partisan objectives. Analyses of the U.S. federal contract data across both granting administrative agencies and grantee states from 1979 to 2018 demonstrate that a federal government’s pro-market standing does not directly translate into public procurement. Instead, we demonstrate that the institutional structure of the government constitutes opportunities for asymmetrical deployment of partisan ideologies, as a conservative federal government uses contracting as a market-based solution to both administrative and political challenges. Specifically, under Republican administrations, compared to their Democratic counterparts, noncompetitive contracting is more heavily used in response to budget uncertainty while competitive contracting turns out to buffer the federal government from electoral uncertainty.