By JOE SHARKEY
Published: April 26, 2005

Everybody has a favorite story from what I think of as the T.S.A. Follies.

Here’s mine. A uniformed pilot waits impatiently at a checkpoint for 10 minutes while two screeners from the Transportation Security Administration scrutinize every item in his carry-on bag.

After he was allowed to go on his way, he explained why it took so long.

“They told me they had to make sure I wasn’t carrying anything that would allow me to take over an airplane,” he said, rolling his eyes.

Last week, reports from several government departments confirmed what most business travelers and other frequent fliers already knew: after spending more than $5 billion in federal funds on the agency, airport security is hardly any better now than it was before 9/11.

Created to impose tight federal control over commercial airport security after the 2001 terrorist attacks, the agency continues to get failing or barely passing grades. Covert screening tests by the Government Accountability Office and the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security showed virtually no improvement in overall screener performance since similarly poor performance reviews last year, said Representative John L. Mica, the Florida Republican who is chairman of the House aviation subcommittee.

“Over the last three and a half years, we have spent billions of dollars creating a Soviet-style centralized bureaucracy that has resulted in great inefficiencies and inflexibility, with little improvement in screener effectiveness,” Mr. Mica, a long-time critic of the agency, said in a statement last week.

In its reply, the agency said that it needed more money to improve performance with better technology, like new machines for detection of explosives.

Meanwhile, “we will continue to seek incremental gains in screener performance through training, testing and management practices,” the agency said.

Over the years, this column has reported regularly on the T.S.A. Follies, with enthusiastic assistance from perplexed business travelers. In Congress, partly as a consequence of audits that showed heavy spending by the agency on frills like parties and fancy offices, there are calls to scale back the agency’s scope and perhaps replace its screeners with employees from private companies.

Bureaucratic rigidity aside, frequent fliers have plenty of other complaints about the agency. For example, they protest that rules keep changing, with haphazard, inconsistent and sometimes rude enforcement at checkpoints. Personal searches such as poking infants in swaddling clothes or forcing octogenarians to wobble from their wheelchairs often appear to be unnecessary, they say, and are sometimes downright intrusive. Remember the outcry last year from female travelers subjected to invasive body pat-downs after reports that two female Chechen terrorists might have blown up a pair of Russian airliners?

Travelers also worry about theft from checked bags – more than two dozen of the agency’s screeners have been arrested on theft charges in the last two years – and they react with a mixture of bewilderment and resentment to the agency’s Catch-22 policy on taking off your shoes. You do not have to remove them, the policy says, but if you do not, you will be ordered off to the secondary inspection area, where you do have to take them off.

Let’s have a look at the most recent refinement of the agency’s list of prohibited items. Last week, it extended its ban on liquid-fuel and butane lighters in checked luggage to cover carry-on bags as well, while continuing to permit safety matches. A minor change, perhaps, but it created a strong reaction.

“They take my lighter away but allow me to have matches?” asked Burt Wolf, a broadcast journalist who roams the world producing reports for public television on travel, food and cultural history. “My son, Stephen, does special effects for movies, and one of his areas of expertise is explosions. I asked him, ‘Is there any explosive that I can’t blow up with a match?’ He said, ‘No, absolutely not.’ ”

Organizations as diverse as the Business Travel Coalition and the Zippo Manufacturing Company quickly became involved. The Business Travel Coalition, which represents the interests of corporate travel departments and business travelers, and which has no discernible interest in cigarette lighters per se, denounced the new rule as silly and said it would only cause longer security lines without adding any new measure of safety.

One hazard is that inadequate half-measures like banning lighters instill a false sense of security, said Kevin Mitchell, chairman of the coalition. Mr. Mitchell argues that all anyone needs to ignite any nonmetallic explosive that gets through security (where screening for nonmetallic explosives is virtually nil) are a safety match or two AA batteries and a wire.

But by focusing on things like lighters and nail files and routinely changing signals, Mr. Mitchell said the agency had failed to develop long-proposed risk-based programs that would allow frequent travelers to use special security lines after registering some personal and travel information in advance. Mr. Mitchell said a program like that would enhance security by reducing crowds and confusion at checkpoints.

Travelers continue to experience inconsistencies at checkpoints from one airport to another and even within airports, Mr. Mitchell added. He predicted that ever-lengthening lines filled with tourists and other not-so-frequent fliers in the coming summer season would create soft, highly visible targets for terrorists.

Greg Booth, Zippo’s chief executive, said that the agency was listening carefully to his company’s assertion that lighters in checked bags had never posed a safety hazard. He said that he expected the ban on lighters in checked bags would be lifted.

In the meantime, you’re free to pack the following items in your checked bags: unloaded firearms, ammunition, hatchets, cattle prods, blackjacks, billy clubs, stun guns and meat cleavers.

On the Road appears each Tuesday. E-mail: jsharkey@nytimes.com