President Donald Trump has ordered contractors to dismantle and redo weeks of work on a new White House helipad after expressing dissatisfaction with its appearance and raising questions about whether the sloped South Lawn itself must be regraded, according to two people familiar with his private comments reported by the Washington Post.

Trump, 80, has made the helipad a priority, directing that work which began in June be completed ahead of a state visit in September. However, he was unhappy with the initial results. "The White House's South Lawn, where the helipad is being built, slants downward. Trump has expressed a desire for a landing pad that sits level with the horizon, prompting contractors to disassemble their work and consider whether to start by changing the lawn itself," the Post reported.

No previous administration has built a permanent hard-surface helipad on the South Lawn, where Marine One has landed since the Dwight D. Eisenhower era. Presidents have historically relied on the grass itself as a landing surface.

Photographs obtained by the newspaper show construction crews dismantling their progress, including a 100-foot-wide granite presidential seal that had begun taking shape just last week.

The setback complicates Trump's timeline. He has pushed to complete the project before a September state visit and, ideally, before Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit later that month. Construction crews have been working around the clock to meet that deadline.

It remains unclear how much the latest changes will add to the project's cost, already estimated at more than $5 million. The project is funded by Lockheed Martin, which owns Sikorsky, the manufacturer of the Marine One helicopter fleet. Neither Lockheed Martin nor Clark Construction, the project's contractor, commented on whether additional costs would be covered. The White House did not address the president's specific changes.

White House spokesman Davis Ingle defended the project broadly, stating that the grounds have "never looked better" under Trump's leadership and that a proper helipad is needed to protect the lawn from helicopter exhaust.

The South Lawn slopes downward by as much as 20 degrees in some areas — steeper than federal guidelines recommend for helicopter landing zones. However, pads do not need to be perfectly level; they must only be flat enough for safety while still allowing water runoff.

The site selected for the new pad, near the South Portico where Marine One has traditionally landed, is flatter than surrounding areas but apparently still not level enough to meet Trump's preference.

The project originates from a technical issue tied to a broader fleet modernization: the newer VH-92A Patriot helicopters, which are replacing the aging VH-3D Sea Kings that have carried presidents since the 1970s, direct exhaust downward, risking scorched grass on the South Lawn. Sikorsky spent years working with administration officials on a solution before Trump approved the construction of a dedicated helipad, as previously reported by the Washington Post.

In the meantime, Marine One has been using the Ellipse, a public park managed by the National Park Service located just south of the White House, as a temporary landing zone while the permanent site is reworked.