Roger Johnson Wins Confirmation to GSA : Government: O.C. businessman and Republican ally of the President breezes through Senate without opposition.

Orange County businessman Roger Johnson, the only Republican nominated to a high-level post in the Clinton Administration, has been confirmed by the Senate to head the General Services Administration.

“I am clearly honored to be asked by the President to come in and help him in this enormous job,” Johnson said Thursday of his new job as head of the federal government’s housekeeping agency with 20,000 employees and an annual budget of $10.4 billion.

One of his top priorities under consideration, he said, is a three- to six-month freeze on all federal building and courthouse projects not already under construction, to determine if they are needed and cost-efficient. Among the courthouses that conceivably could be affected is the federal judicial complex planned for Santa Ana’s Civic Center.

The appointment of Johnson, the former president and chief executive officer of Irvine-based Western Digital Corp., sailed through the Senate without opposition Wednesday night. He was confirmed on a voice vote by unanimous consent after being nominated by President Clinton on March 29.

He is scheduled to take the oath of office Thursday, once his nomination is formally cleared by the State Department.

While claiming that his political party affiliation was not the basis for his appointment, Johnson became a key political player last year when he broke ranks with the Republican Party to support Bill Clinton’s presidential bid.

During Senate confirmation hearings, Johnson echoed the Administration’s pledge to “reinvent government,” vowing to remake the GSA into a more efficient, less-centralized agency that is more trusting of its employees and the businesses with which it contracts.

Johnson said in an interview Thursday that many federal building construction projects are under attack because other options were not considered, the costs are too high, or the GSA’s site selection process was flawed. As part of the Vice President’s Performance Review Process--intended to weed out waste in government--Johnson said he would review the merit and costs of the building projects.

“At a time when we are having trouble finding money to inoculate our kids, at a time when we are having a big battle to reduce our deficit, I think it would be appropriate to look at our building projects,” Johnson said, adding that the 1994 budget incudes $6 billion for federal office and courthouse projects.

Congress has been asked to appropriate $168 million to build a new, 300,000-square-foot federal courthouse in Santa Ana. A House appropriations subcommittee has approved $151 million for the project.

In another area, Johnson said he hoped to relax the qualifying process for contractors whose products are already available commercially.

He said he has heard numerous complaints--spearheaded by computer software firms--that companies are required to submit volumes of information justifying their prices even though the products are publicly sold and well known in the marketplace.

As he did during the confirmation hearings, Johnson complained that some government regulations are based on the assumption that employees and businesses are out to defraud the government. He said he would set regulations “that assume people are basically honest.”

Pointing to his own confirmation process as an example, Johnson said he had been required to list gifts he had received in recent years valued at over $100.

“You think of that question. Why would someone ask you that? Because they assume that if someone gives you a gift and you are not ethical enough, you will be beholden to the person who gave you that gift. I think that’s a silly situation,” Johnson said.

What is needed instead, he added, is a system that “makes the cost of fraud, the penalty, a very high risk.”

Johnson, as the head of the computer products firm for 11 years, took the Fortune 500 company from 811 to 7,600 employees. His confirmation makes his resignation from the firm official.

Under a severance package negotiated last December, the company will pay Johnson two years’ salary at $500,000 a year and forgive a $335,000, no-interest loan. A special bonus of $500,000 that was to be paid upon his resignation was withdrawn, in light of an industrywide downturn in earnings for the fourth quarter of the fiscal year that ended June 30.

Chuck Haggerty, the company’s current president and chief executive officer, has been widely speculated as Johnson’s expected replacement.