Officials from the Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency responsible for overseeing voting machines used in thousands of jurisdictions across the country and helping states adopt good election administration practices, pleaded with lawmakers for more money to do their jobs ahead of the 2020 elections.

The federal agency is working with a staff and budget that are about half what they were 10 years ago, officials said Wednesday as lawmakers grappled with how to beef up the agency.

The commission “lacks sufficient funding for the human capital capacity to address” dozens of areas where it needs to do work before the national elections in 2020, Chairwoman Christy McCormick and three other commissioners said in a joint statement prepared for the Senate Rules and Administration Committee.

The commission has 22 employees compared with 49 nearly a decade ago, and operates on a budget that is about 50 percent of what it was in fiscal 2010, the commissioners said. “Without additional resources, it’ll be a formidable stretch” for the staff to “support our nation’s election administrators and voters,” they said.

Sen. Roy Blunt, who chairs the Senate Rules panel that oversees the commission, said he couldn’t promise the agency would get the full complement of staff and budget it needed but was open “to talking about what they [would] do with the staffing, if they had it.”