For 2), "creative accounting" is exactly what it is. Research grants are for research. The money can be spent on various things, which include salaries of researchers, the cost of lab equipment and supplies, and there's even a special category for "overhead", which is the money that goes straight to the mother institution to keep the lights on. The trick is to allocate $55k per grad student in the grant, and instantly take $20k from it to pay for the "tuition". In practice, the science labs, and the grad students are bringing income to the universities through the grants they get, and the universities additionally charge them for the privilege to do so.
It's because the tax bill needed to pass through reconciliation (which has special rules related to the deficit). Generating artificial savings on paper allowed the GOP to increase the size of the tax cut on paper.
2) "creative accounting" and "skim more money" are pretty ridiculous ways to describe how research grants work. It's a system like any other. Disrupting it for no particular reason is anything but conservative.