The Election Assistance Commission came into existence as part of the Help America Vote Act of 2002, the law that Congress passed to aid states in modernizing their elections following the widespread problems reported during the 2000 presidential balloting. The independent, bipartisan agency was tasked first with distributing $3.1 billion in federal funds to states updating their voting machines. Its ongoing responsibilities include providing guidance to states on federal election law, maintaining the national voter registration form, and certifying voting machines and testing labs for new machines.

Harper has argued that the EAC was always intended to be temporary and that with the money earmarked for states now out the door, its remaining functions can be assigned to the Federal Election Commission. “The EAC does not register voters, it does not conduct recounts, nor does it have any enforcement authority over laws governing voter registration or anything else essential to the operation of our elections,” he said in a statement. “Bottom line, the agency does not administer elections, and the time to eliminate the EAC has come.” In the same hearing last week, Harper’s committee voted to do away with the program providing matching funds for presidential candidates, which no major-party nominee has used since 2008.

As a budget-cutting measure, scrapping the EAC would be roughly akin to a household deciding to forgo two-ply toilet paper in favor of the flimsier variety for a few months. Congress appropriated just $8 million to the commission in the last fiscal year—about a third of what the agency used to receive and a minuscule fraction of the $3.54 trillion federal budget in 2016. Republicans say it’s a good place to start, but Democratic defenders of the EAC argue that despite its small footprint, the commission serves important functions and that it’s especially foolhardy to get rid of it at a time of heightened concerns about the integrity of U.S. elections. “This is the time when we should be focusing on strengthening the only federal agency charged with making elections work for all Americans, not trying to eliminate it,” said Representative Robert Brady of Pennsylvania, the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee.

The EAC went fallow for a few years when the Senate stalled in confirming new commissioners, a period that delayed the introduction of new voting machines in some states because the agency could not approve new guidelines. Now housed outside Washington in a small suite of offices in suburban Maryland, the EAC is waging a public battle for its very existence. The commission’s chairman, Thomas Hicks, issued a statement denouncing the GOP move to eliminate the EAC as being “seriously out of step with the current U.S. election landscape.” And in a subsequent phone interview, Hicks noted that among its other activities during the 2016 election, the agency had provided critical guidance to states seeking to bolster their systems against the threat of cyberattack.