The White House is tak­ing a stand.

Ac­cord­ing to a re­cent pub­lic so­li­cit­a­tion, the Ex­ec­ut­ive Of­fice of the Pres­id­ent is seek­ing up to $700,000 worth of stand­ing desks. The cost is the gov­ern­ment’s best es­tim­ate over a five-year peri­od, al­though the Obama ad­min­is­tra­tion will end in Janu­ary 2017, and the lat­ter four years of the con­tract are op­tion­al.

The fed­er­al gov­ern­ment post­ing was quite spe­cif­ic in that the desks had to be “Var­idesk brand name or equal” and provide the con­tract­or’s pri­cing for vari­ous mod­els with up to three com­puter mon­it­ors. The lar­ger Var­idesks cost between $400 and $500 per unit.

The full min­im­um re­quire­ments are lis­ted be­low:

1) A fully as­sembled height ad­justable stand­ing desktop that sits on top of an ex­ist­ing desk (no as­sembly [i.e., no clamps or arms]); 2) Key­board/mouse tray in­cluded as part of the sys­tem; 3) Ease of use (mul­tiple heights/po­s­i­tions); 4) The ad­just­ment must be sturdy, stable and safe at all height ex­ten­sions to ac­com­mod­ate in­di­vidu­als of vari­ous heights while they are in a stand­ing po­s­i­tion; 5) Dur­able, abil­ity to with­stand wear and tear; 6) Must hold up to 35 pounds; 7) Desk at­tach­ment should have an op­tion that fits eas­ily in­to corners; 8) No loss of work space; 9) Col­or: black unit; 10) Must be fully port­able (eas­ily moved from desk to desk) and eas­ily stored (not cum­ber­some or bulky for stor­age); and 11) Min­im­um of one-year war­ranty in­cluded.

Op­tion­al ac­cessor­ies: 1) Stand­ing mats, dur­able, sturdy, nonslip, and stable cush­ion­ing to sup­port legs and back dur­ing long-term stand­ing.

The stand­ing-desk craze might have re­cently reached a new peak, but some high-pro­file Re­pub­lic­ans in pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tions have evan­gel­ized the an­ti­sedent­ary life. In a 2002 memo on in­ter­rog­a­tion tech­niques, former De­fense Sec­ret­ary Don­ald Rums­feld fam­ously ques­tioned some of the lim­its on de­tain­ees. “I stand for 8-10 hours a day,” he wrote. “Why is stand­ing lim­ited to four hours?”