Republican Head of GSA Plans to Stay : Government: Orange County man admits breaking rules. But ethics charges against him stem from his efforts to cut waste, he says.

With allegations of ethics violations continuing to swirl around him, Roger W. Johnson says he is determined to stay on as head of the General Services Administration, even stepping up the changes he believes have caused him to be “treated like a virus” in the nation’s capital.

Johnson, former CEO of Western Digital Corp. in Irvine and the highest-ranking Republican in the Clinton Administration, has repeatedly acknowledged he broke some government ethics rules since coming to Washington in 1993. But he has argued that the vigorous scrutiny given his actions has less to do with ethics than with derailing his attempts to reorganize a $60-billion agency long seen as the epitome of wasteful bureaucracy.

“All I can say to those narrow-minded few who want to stop us is that if they thought their sacred cows were in trouble over the past year and one half, then they don’t know what trouble really is,” an angry Johnson, 60, said in an interview in his Washington, D.C., office last week, awaiting the results of the second inspector general’s investigation launched since he took over the post.

Since coming to Washington, Johnson has been accused by the news media and critics inside the troubled agency he inherited of using government mail and phones for personal use, of asking his government secretary to await the arrival of furniture being moved from his Laguna Beach house to his Georgetown home and of using his government chauffeur for personal trips to the airport.

On Monday, the Washington Post reported that he failed to inform the Office of Government Ethics when certain terms of his severance agreement with Western Digital changed. Although it appears no disclosure laws were violated, such has been the stuff of Page 1 news, leading Johnson to question whether public service is worth all the trouble.

“Here I am under the ethics cloud. I take that very personally. I have never done anything unethical in my life. I have certainly done things that are stupid . . . but where I come from, (violating) ethics involves some sort of intent.”

Johnson’s office estimates he has saved the government nearly $2 billion by trimming the fat out of courthouse construction projects and reorganizing other GSA programs. But bigger news was made of his decision to repay the government $1,062 in questionable expenses, even though an inspector general’s inquiry concluded he owed just $73.

Johnson thought he had survived the turmoil last spring by making peace with lawmakers his cost-cutting programs had offended. But enemies inside GSA have continued to assail him in a newsletter called “Crosswind--GSA News From a Democratic Perspective,” which has called Johnson “arrogant, cocky and stupid,” and suggested he is “a mole” secretly raising money for Republican congressional candidates.

Johnson and his aides attribute much of the anger to a renegade union official bent on running Johnson back to Orange County. Johnson’s experience may be testimony to how difficult it is for a powerful CEO to make the transition to public life.

“All these regulations cause the federal employee to do stupid things,” he said. “My secretary offers to go home and wait for the furniture. In the alternative, I could have gone home and the government would have let me sit there for the whole day. That, in my view, is dumb.”

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The intensive scrutiny has already led Johnson to hire an attorney--veteran Washingtonian Albert Beveridge III. He now pays for all trips to California--even those that are business related--out of his pocket and is using a personal credit card to charge most phone calls out of his office.

“I can’t get in the position of defending it, so I’m just not going to bother with it,” he said.

None of the violations have been serious enough to warrant Johnson’s resignation in the eyes of the White House, and President Clinton singled him out for “a special word of thanks” during a campaign stop last weekend in Anaheim.