After the Oslo Accords (ca. 1995), Palestinian Authority waste experts were charged with protecting the environment “shared” between the occupied territories they partially governed and Israel. Experts sought to manage Palestinian wastes in the West Bank independently of Israel. Managing waste was for many a national duty in that it aimed at building Palestinians a liberated state. Waste management was also newly considered “technical” work, work therefore divorced from politics—defined as direct engagement with military occupation. As it turned out, however, there was little the PA could do to build environment-protecting infrastructures that did not involve Israel in their designing, planning, licensing, constructing and even operating stages. The “authorship” of PA infrastructures designed to be “by the nation, for the nation,” was therefore not singular. This paper examines the case of the PA’s recently halted Ramallah regional landfill plan, which had been an Israeli civil administration plan in the 1980s. Between the mid-1990s and 2014, the PA borrowed measurements designing the landfill from the earlier Israeli plans. This paper asks how experts were nevertheless able to view their work as technical and as national (and therefore not as political) while they “admitted” to borrowing designs from the occupier from whom the nation’s infrastructures would help wrest independence. My answer points to the field of what I call the “technical-national,” which emerged as a post-Oslo, local framework for understanding PA waste management reforms toward the building of a state. The technical-national can be viewed as a framework capacious enough to offer a resolution to one of the many incoherencies of statecraft attempted under military occupation. This paper also examines some of the effects of the technical-national’s emergence on the relationship between governors and governed. PA reformers’ own training recommended calculations and infrastructures alternative to the ones they had borrowed from Israel, for example. One effect of the technical-national was thus that--in defense of their borrowed plans--experts repeatedly disavowed the forms of expertise in which they themselves had been trained, when facing critical local publics. The same measurements that offered experts the possibility of governing the occupied landscape thus also rendered that governance illegitimate in the eyes of those they governed.