prior-scores

prior-scores is a command for coding agents from PolicyEngine/policyengine-claude. It costs 36 tokens per session (620 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A command for finding published estimates from government budget offices and research groups about a proposed tax or benefit change.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for researching how organizations such as CBO or JCT have estimated similar reforms, with filters for country, topic, and source type.
Why use it?
It provides outside estimates to compare with your own rough numbers, without running a detailed tax simulation.

Command

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add commands/policyengine/policyengine-claude/prior-scores
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/PolicyEngine/policyengine-claude

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for prior-scores

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/policyengine/policyengine-claude/prior-scores.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/commands/policyengine/policyengine-claude/prior-scores)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/commands/policyengine/policyengine-claude/prior-scores"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/policyengine/policyengine-claude/prior-scores.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 36 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 620 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00036 $0.00620
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.00310
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00124
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00062

Measured 5d ago against content hash f6a4dd8a7e55, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

prior-scores scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 5d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

commands/prior-scores.md · 47 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 47 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Prior scores lookup

Standalone entry for external-benchmark research. Runs prior-scores-finder (Stage 3 of /analyze-policy) without the microsim or comparison stages.

When to use

  • "What has JCT / CBO scored on this reform shape?"
  • "Have any think-tanks published estimates for a similar SALT cap change?"
  • "I already have a rough sense of my number; I just want to see whose external estimates I should benchmark against."

Do NOT use this to substitute for a microsim — this just aggregates what OTHER organizations have scored. /analyze-policy compares PE's own model against them.

Arguments

$ARGUMENTS — a reform description or bill reference. Same argument shape as /analyze-policy.

Flags:

  • --country {us|uk|ca} — determines which scorekeepers to consult (from presets/scorekeepers.yaml)
  • --tier {2|3|all} — Tier 2 = official fiscal offices (JCT, CBO, OBR, PBO); Tier 3 = think-tanks (CRFB, TPC, IFS, etc.); all = both. Default all.
  • --domain <tag> — restrict to scorekeepers marked as covering this domain (tax, benefits, healthcare, distributional, etc.)

What this command does

  1. Loads the scorekeepers registry (presets/scorekeepers.yaml) filtered by country + tier + domain.
  2. Also consults Tier 0 (local analyses/ archive) via scripts/analyses_kb.py — surfaces prior PE runs on the same parameter family.
  3. Also consults Tier 1 (PolicyEngine published research) via the policyengine-prior-scores skill.
  4. Iterates through each scorekeeper's search_hints, runs WebSearch queries, and extracts headline magnitudes.
  5. Returns a structured benchmark cluster ready to feed into a research writeup — same shape as benchmark_sources[] in an archived analysis.

Output

Ranked list of external scores with:

  • Source name + URL
  • Their estimate (10-year cost, per-year cost, poverty change, or whatever they published)
  • Reform shape they scored (may differ from yours — note structural distance)
  • Methodology notes (static / dynamic, dataset, baseline)

Read the full file on GitHub · 47 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 5d ago First seen · 47 lines · 36 tokens per session scan A f6a4dd8a7e55

Subscribe to this mod's changes

prior-scores is a command published in the GitHub repository PolicyEngine/policyengine-claude (32 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 36 tokens to every session and 620 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.