Breaking Down Trump's 'Skinny Budget'

This week, President Donald Trump released his new federal “skinny budget” proposal. The budget comes in at only 50 pages, less than half the size of previous administrations’ budgets.

Height Securities analyst Peter Cohn combed through the new budget looking for stocks that could benefit under Trump’s plan.

Among the major budget changes Trump is calling for is a $54 billion bump to defense-related accounts and $77 billion in military-related Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO). Together, the two spending boosts represent a total of $131 billion in proposed new military-related spending. While Trump hasn't proposed a way to pay for the $77 billion in new OCO spending, the $54 billion in new defense spending will be paid for by aggressive domestic spending cuts, such as a 31 percent cut for the EPA, a 29 percent cut for the State Department and a 21 percent cut for the Department of Labor.

In addition to the $131 billion uptick in military spending, Trump also proposes an extra $4.1 billion for the Department of Homeland Security for building the Mexican border wall and upping immigration-related detention.

“As expected, there are no details about Trump’s ‘phenomenal’ tax plan or any entitlement reform proposals, but we know from prior Administration commentary that the White House is avoiding cuts to Social Security and Medicare (and ACA repeal counts as entitlement reform to some extent),” Cohn noted.

Related Link: Fed Moves Markets With First Rate Hike Of 2017: On Path To 'Beautiful Normalization'

According to Cohn, Corecivic Inc CXW and The GEO Group Inc GEO could get a big portion of that new detention money.

In addition, Cohn names the following stocks as beneficiaries of the rise in military spending:

  • Boeing Co BA
  • Lockheed Martin Corporation LMT
  • General Dynamics Corporation GD
  • Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc HII
  • Raytheon Company RTN
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Posted In: Analyst ColorPoliticsTop StoriesTrading IdeasGeneralDonald TrumpHeight SecuritiesPeter CohnSkinny Budget
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